


The Mechanized Archives

by CloudDreamer



Series: The Mechanized Archives [1]
Category: Dr Carmilla (Musician), The Magnus Archives (Podcast), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Dr Carmilla Has ADHD, Dr Carmilla's A+ Parenting, Dubiously Consensual Science, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/F, Hemophilia, Hypocrisy, Implied/Referenced Torture, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist Needs a Hug, Local Lesbian Comes To Terms With Gender identity; Death Toll in the Mlilions, M/M, Multi, Non-Consensual Blood Drinking, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Partial Mind Control, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Revolutionary Ethics, Self Harm, Suicide, Temporary Character Death, The Mechanisms Are Not Jon's College Band; They Are Space Pirates And Will Fuck You Up, Threats of Violence, Tim Stoker (The Magnus Archives) Lives, Trench Warfare, Vampires, if elias can have simps then so can gertrude robinson
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:28:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 30,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23947693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: Statements regarding the immortal space pirates known as Dr Carmilla & The Mechanisms and their involvement in events at The Magnus Institute, London.
Relationships: Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Bertie/Jonny d'Ville/Gunpowder Tim, Dr Carmilla & The Mechanisms Ensemble, Dr Carmilla/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Georgie Barker/Melanie King, Jonny d'Ville & Jonathan Sims, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, The Aurora/Nastya Rasputina, The Mechanisms Ensemble/The Mechanisms Ensemble
Series: The Mechanized Archives [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1691956
Comments: 21
Kudos: 71





	1. MECH 01 - Alive, I Cried

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Case #0151508. Statement of Nastya Rasputina, regarding... her life, her death, her life again, and her death again. Original statement given August 15, 2015. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of The Magnus Institute, London.
> 
> Statement begins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Compiled all these statements into a chapter fic, since they're no longer unconnected one shots.
> 
> TW: Parental neglect, Russian royalty typical hemophilia, dubiously consensual science, mortality, self harm and suicide from the perspective of an immortal.

I was born the princess of Cyberia. You wouldn’t know it. It’s a planet, far away from here and your small, petty concerns, Gertrude. We had our own small, petty concerns, back then. I was raised surrounded by servants and tutors well paid to keep me in ignorance of the world, and they taught me that my people loved me, that God had chosen my father to rule and my mother to guide him. I was kept separate from them of course. Before the day they rose up in revolution and marched to our palace, weapons in hand, I’d never talked to a single one.

I sat in my window seat, as I’d done a thousand times before, and watched as they came closer and closer. I’d heard my parents whisper about the dangers of revolution when they thought I couldn’t hear, but it always was a distant sort of fear, discussed in the same general terms as food shortages. Always, my father, the tsar, said they could fix it, even as he parceled away further pieces of his power to democratic assemblies that were short of what the people demanded.

Back then, I didn’t understand the conditions the workers labored under or that the order enforced by a police state that my father had demanded as a matter of principle fostered resentment. I couldn’t have seen how that resentment boiled. I only knew they were supposed to love us, and my church preached forgiveness, albeit only after the stern hand of the father— the state— had delivered proper recompense. My father intended to have the people who’d marched to our gate demanding change to that slaughtered, but I begged him to spare them.

It was a beautiful night. It has been million of years, and that planet’s sun has long since consumed every trace of my old life, but I remember how the snow fell with pinpoint precision. I could sing you a beautiful song, and then you might know a fraction of it, but you aren’t here for the beauty. You’re here for the fear. We all have our hungers, in these long lives we live.

I was born with a particular blood condition that made clotting difficult. It would be an exaggeration to say that a single cut would leave me dead in a matter of minutes from blood loss but not a complete lie. I was treated like glass. Anything that could be a threat was taken away from me, and I was frequently scolded about the dangers of the outside world. I rarely left the palace, and when I did, I was escorted by far too many caretakers. No other children could be brought to play with me, for fear that they, in their youthful joyance, would leave me dead. Edges on tables were sanded down, and toys were carefully inspected for any points that I might slice open my skin. I checked and double checked every single step I took. I was informed, in graphic detail that was altogether unsuited for a young child, of what fate would befall me if I made a mistake.

Cyberia was far more advanced than this civilization, but our skills laid primarily in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence, advancements my father sung the praises of at every opportunity except at home. I would not be replaced by ones and zeroes. I never fully agreed with this perspective, as my bloody demise seemed much more of a threat than the abstract truth of the soul, but I suppose I internalized it nonetheless, when I found the metal coursing through me horrifyingly alien.

My pleas for mercy fell on receptive ears, but by then, it was too late. The people had been enraged by decades of my father’s mismanagement. I don’t know if killing the revolutionaries would’ve spared my family. I believed myself culpable in their demise for many years, and you might wish to consider what I consider a long time. Civilizations rose from the dust and collapsed back into it while I labored under my guilt. They burst through the gates and tore the guards to pieces, even as they refused to shoot. My tutor, who I’d thought I could trust, swore to me that I would die for the sake of equality, that she would do her best to make my death quick; nothing like the drawn out exsanguination the curse in my blood promised.

I fled, but I did not escape the vision of my father’s and my mother’s deaths. They were quicker than the most furious of the revolutionaries would’ve liked, but not without pain. They’d believed until the last that the true Cyberians believed in them, but the people who took their lives were the very Cyberians they’d thought loved them. I tore out into the cold air, my clothes too big for me. I’d escaped being lined against the wall and shot with the rest of my siblings, but that didn’t mean I was unharmed.

Just one bullet. It barely grazed me. I didn’t even slow down as I felt it slice against my shoulder, tearing open my royal veins, though I knew what it meant. A death sentence, as sure as if it’d hit my heart right away. My tears were frozen on my face. I ran into the woods, not caring as the branches raked against my pale skin, even though I knew the cuts they opened were dooming me further. The blood soaked through my dress, slowly but surely. I felt a wild sort of euphoria, feeling the truly sharp pain for the first time and breathing the winter air, though I’m sure I was in shock. Trauma, hypothermia, blood loss… the whole lot.

It was then that I found her. The Aurora. My lover, though I didn’t know her as such yet. I recognized it as escape, if not from my death then from the cold sinking into my bones. She opened her doors for me, recognizing me as the terrified child I was. I fled inside but recognized the mundane passageways for frequently trafficked ones by a violent crowd. I climbed with a carefully practiced and rather irresponsible ease into tunnels she opened for me. I crawled through her vents to her core, letting the heat in her servers wash over me. The cold had slowed the bleeding, and it was coming fiercely now. I was slick with it. I felt inevitability wash over me, somehow peaceful despite my panicked flight from the palace only moments ago. I was seventeen years old and one month, an age my body has remained since that fateful night even though I’ve seen more than even your god could comprehend.

My vision was blurry, but I saw before me a woman. I thought her to be a manifestation of the warmth of the ship, the soft whispers of violin that had lured me to this haven where I would die in comfort, but when she grew closer, I knew that was not the case with a clarity colder than the forest outside my home had been. There was a sickening unease to her presence. Her teeth were sharp, and her eyes were intent with wicked intelligence. I might’ve mistaken her for one of your lot, if I’d known about you back then, with how she saw through me.

The only warmth in Doctor Carmilla was stained across her lips, drained from someone else to carry her further. She knew my name. She knew my entire story. She knew what I, with my precarious body and egg shell treatment, always longed for. I didn’t question it at the time— I knew she wasn’t the angel who’d brought me to the heart of the ship, but I still believed her to be a miracle. She promised she would be my savior. I don’t know if I said yes. If I’d said no, begged her to stop and let me die in the Aurora’s embrace, would she have listened? I moved my head, shook it either up or to the side, and she took my hand, regardless of what Id said. Her hands weren’t large in mine— her form was long and slender with a languid grace— but I felt like a child when she pulled me upwards.

She practically held me up, I had so little strength. Her tongue lashed out to lick the droplets of blood that’d spilled from scratches on my face. My father rarely touched us so casually. I ran my fingers against the walls of the Aurora, and she vibrated with excitement where our edges touched. I felt my hand fall away before I lost all power to control my body, just as the walls changed from worn metal in homely corridors to sterile white tiles with stains of not completely cleaned blood.

The Aurora known me as a kindred soul the moment she’d had landed on the planet. Had the ship asked for this for me, or had she simply thought of me warmly and Doctor Carmilla had made assumptions about what she wanted from that? I never asked her those things when I first awoke, and I’ve never done so over the years since. I’d only just started to know her then, in the most superficial way, but being dragged into Doctor Carmilla’s lab, where her presence was weakest, even if it was never absent, felt like the first shot all over again. I collapsed. All my strings were cut. I know I was still bleeding, still losing my strength even unconscious, but I could’ve sworn, that was the moment I was run dry.

When I woke up again, I felt cold. I didn’t expect to feel cold. If I was in heaven, the unpleasant sensation wouldn’t apply to me. If I was in hell, it’d be so much worse. Sharper. I tightened my hand. It responded sluggishly, and it shook uncontrollably. Doctor Carmilla stood across the room. I recognized it was strange that I knew her name. I knew a lot of things about her, suddenly, but they were one sided facts. She had not saved my life. I’d died, completely. My veins were completely dry when she’d ran her quicksilver magic through them.

She’d brought me back from the brink, and my brain wanted me to believe this was a good thing. I’d only been alive again for seconds, and they were ones filled with fear. Not fear of what this meant, but fear of being away from here, fear of losing her, fear of losing this— even though I didn’t know what this was. She seemed like magic to me, even as something twisted in my gut. I tilted my head to examine all my cuts that I’d known signed my death warrant and found not even scars. My body was perfect, untouched.

Out of a morbid curiosity, I dug my nails into my skin and let out a tiny gasp at the pain. I was not physically strong before my death, my nails were not sharp as a matter of safety, and neither of these traits increased much following my resurrection. It’d just… never done that before. It hurt worse, somehow, then bleeding to death slowly as I fled the only home I’d ever known in a mad fury had. At least then, adrenaline had run through me. Did I even still have that capacity?

It’s funny to think back on now. I was practically brought to my knees by the pain of my own carefully trimmed nails. I was never allowed to touch myself, for fear that I’d break so badly I’d never recover. I pulled my hand away and the thin lines of stress I’d seen a servant cover herself in when she was anxious faded so quickly, it was like they were never there. Since then? I’ve been vaporized by a supernovae up close. I’ve gotten shot to death more times than I can remember. I’ve jumped out of the Aurora when we’re still in a stratosphere without a parachute just because I could. I’ve played rounds of Never Have I Ever styled after suicide attempts with the rest of the crew and only Jonny, Doctor Carmilla’s first go around who's got a good whiles head start on the rest of us, comes out on top.

I never stopped feeling the pain. That wasn’t part of the package. It’s just that it feels different, the billionth time you pinch yourself with nails and the first. Each time is distinct in my mind. It’s not as sharp for me as it is Ivy— she’s much more like you lot than she is me. For her, it’s never about the visceral reality of death, becoming undone and redoing yourself an uncountably vast number of times but never remaining in that state of perfect oblivion for long enough to see what’s on the other side. I do the same thing now, dig my much sharper nails into my equally soft skin, and silver blood runs down my wrist.

I’m not particularly stronger, since physical strength is built up by pushing your muscles to the limits and letting them break just a little bit, and I heal too fast. I can’t change in any meaningful way. My hair grows slowly, and not in the human understanding of slow. I cut my hair last on the Ides of March, when Julius Caesar was stabbed to death, an event we watched and recorded in our songs and with our Archivist but took no especially large part in. The “e tu” really was an invention of Shakespeare, if you're curious and you always are. It was not a noble death either, as you might imagine or dramatize. He was scared. At the end, tsars and kings die like anyone else. Anyone but us.

My hair then was an inch longer than it is now. When I lose my head, it returns to me at the same point of length, with nothing to mark the incongruity. These nails took careful cultivation. My body does not grow back if the only part touched is the dead tissue but leaving well alone is not the strong suit of some of my more Rhythm of War orientated comrades. We leave a trail of devastation in our wake. The marks on me heal over, leaving me identical to the soft and sheltered Anastasia I was that night to anyone looking for a wrinkle, but the consequences of those marks burn a path through the forever. I’ll leave you the stain on this paper, let you wonder as you see the elements that make it up should’ve killed me rather than revive me with your strict adherence to what should be, rather than what is.

This shimmering substance has run through my veins since that night. I was terrified of death, haunted by its inevitability every day of my life. I still am. Muscle memory too is harder to develop or overcome, for us early ones. Jonny falls entirely into the patterns he set only moments before his first death, leaving bloody bits and gore in his wake. I hesitate for less than a second to grasp a knife, even in the kitchen, when he’ll hold it by the blade, letting it cut right through his skin. He’ll stand there watching his own blood for hours as something ancient in me squeezes. I ignore it. The pain isn’t gone, and these involuntary reactions will be with me until I die for the last time, if I ever do.

I am unchanging, as the world stays the same around me. Even my precious Aurora will not stay the same. She is almost unrecognizable these decades, and when I call back to those early days, when it was just Jonny, her, and I against the women who’d dragged us back onto this mortal coil unwittingly and perhaps unwillingly. She is gone for now. We abandoned her to the vastness of space that will end in trillions of years. I do not know if she has lived for trillions before. She will return. We will bleed for our arrogance in thinking we could escape her.

The story closes for everybody. We keep them alive, keep their grief and their loss fresh through the ages. We are the grim reminder that nothing lasts forever, and that your present crisis, whether it be over a crush on your assistant to try to burry with casual cruelties or the corruption at your door, will one day be nothing more than a song for us to sing. And when we are gone, and we will be gone eventually and inevitably for nothing escapes the entropy of endings forever, there will be no one left to remember anything lit by your sun.

Statement ends.

There's a lot in this one. Not because it is remotely realistic-- Ms. Rasputina barely included anything remotely resembling a convincing story, let alone any background details to check. If she did not address Gertrude Robinson, I would've suspected this was someone's misfiled creative writing project. I'm still not entirely convinced it isn't.

I did do some follow up on the names mentioned, and it only served to confirm my disbelief in her story. Martin has surprisingly in-depth knowledge of gothic romance novels and has informed me of the existence of Carmilla, a novel by Sheridan La Fanu about a sapphic vampire. There's no plot points about her becoming a Doctor of any sort, particularly not one as Frankensteinian as Ms. Rasputina describes, but we all take certain creative liberties when it comes to a good story.

There are a number of similarities between Ms. Rasputina's alleged home planet of Cyberia and Russia in the last days of Czar Nicholas the Second, and the story of the last Romonav's survival has been the subject of much fictional scrutiny, despite its implausibility. In addition to the extraterrestrial elements of this tall tale, Sasha tells me that it was the youngest Romanav and only son, Aleksi, who suffered from hemophillia. There was a ship named the Aurora involved in the Russian revolution, responsible for firing the first shot in the October Rebellion, but it was no star faring vessel and definitely not sentient like Ms. Rasputina suggests. The name Rasputina is equally suspect, as it is the feminine derivative of Rasputin, the con artist who lied and manipulated his way into the Czar's confidence. Perhaps it is a reference to her alleged lack of mortality, as the historical figure is well known for his improbable survival of many otherwise fatal events.

Still, these details don't make her story any more believable. The detail about Caesar's dying words is true enough, but if it is well known, it is more than possible she could have simply googled it. The stains of mercury, colloquially known as quicksilver, on the statement are suspicious, but mercury is not impossible to obtain. Tim claims one of the old Archival assistants told him about a statement giver who went by "Gunpowder Tim" who'd threatened him with a steampunk looking gun and whose statement was similarly ridiculous to this one, but though I suspect locating it will be somewhat difficult, considering the state of this place. Tim's memory of the description is hazy and the assistant in question, Micheal Shelley, has since left the employ of the Archives.

Ms. Rasputina left no contact information, and so we have been unable to inquire about the possibility of a follow up.

Recording ends.


	2. MECH 02 - A New Web

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Case #0192901. Statement of Melanie King regarding... her experiences following termination for The Magnus Archives at the Unknowing, taken from standard form found in the Archives after a break in. Original statement given on January 29, 2019. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist. 
> 
> Statement begins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Parental abuse, medical torture, dubiously consensual science, abandonment, psychological manipulation, self harm and suicide from the perspective of an immortal,

It’s more than a little weird being around here again. Was it always so damned quiet? Elias hasn’t even tried fucking with me, which is nice. He’s still watching me, but I’m pretty sure he’s scared of me now. Knows my connection to the All-Seeing Eye’s been severed and I couldn’t give less of a shit about the rest of you.

Oh, don’t worry, Archivist, I’m not going to get you killed for no reason. If Jonny hasn’t offed you yet, then he’s got his reasons, and I don’t want to have to deal with him pouting at me for ages. Your brother is a pain in the ass, for the record, and so are all of his friends. At first I was like, wow, can’t believe the Archivist never said his brother was an immortal space pirate, and then I realized, oh, yeah, it’s because he sucks.

I might as well get around to the story already. I’m sure you all thought I’d gotten myself killed. Either that or one of you figured out about the Rhythm of War's bullet and said I’d went and became an Avatar. Well, both are true, to an extent. I don't think I'm an Avatar-- it feels different. I probably would’ve come back just to say hi earlier if it wasn’t for Doc Carmilla, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I survived the actual Unknowing just fine. If you’re wondering who found the remote and blew it up, well, that was me. It was pretty cool too, all fire and explosions, right until the building fell on me. I hit my head a couple of times, but the real problem was my leg, the same one I’d gotten shot by the ghost in India. I’m sure that’s some eldritch fear g-d’s idea of a joke. It didn’t hurt as much as I’d expected. Apparently the most serious wounds don’t tend to hurt that bad because most of the nerves are at the surface. There was a lot of blood, and I don’t know how much of it was mine.

My memory from right before and right after the explosion is a little blurry, for obvious reasons, but I know I was lying there for hours. I’d screamed my throat dry, and then I’d screamed some more. I’m sure I started crying. It was a total mess. I don’t think I stopped, not even when the good Doc found me. It took her using some fancy space vampire shit to get me to calm down enough that I could actually process what she was asking.

How do I describe Doc Carmilla? Besides as a manipulative bastard to rival Elias, that much is obvious. Well, she’s a vampire. Not the lame sort of Earth vampire we have statements about either, the kind that’ll die if you light them on fire or stab them with a sharp enough knife. I tried my hand at all the classics, even when the rest of the Mechanisms said it wouldn’t work. Even when she laughed at me. Tried a couple of them twice. I’d say it’s therapeutic except for where it’s not.

She doesn’t just drink blood, and I don’t think she can starve to death. I can’t figure out exactly what it is she does. Not sure anyone knows. Whatever it is, it’s not fun to be around, and it’s even less fun to be on the receiving end of, apparently. I haven’t gotten the misfortune of being around her when she gets hungry yet, but Ivy says it’s a matter of time, and she’s usually right. I have to says, she’s a much better Archivist than you.

When Doc Carmilla got me to calm down, eventually, she offered me a second chance. Said it wasn’t fair, that you’d left me to die. Now I’m thinking about it, she was probably stretching the facts a little bit, but back then, I was so angry and scared, I said yes before she even said anything about immortality. She helped me to my feet and had this little self-satisfied smile that pissed me off real good, but by the time I thought to question how sharp her teeth were or how cold her hands were, she was carrying me like I weighed as much as a feather.

I didn’t have the strength to struggle, and I’d screamed so much, my voice was gone. Her grip was tight enough to bruise, and now I know she wasn’t even trying to hurt me. She kept saying all this reassuring bullshit about family, and despite my panic and this sick feeling in my gut, it felt so easy to believe her. Like there was something I’d been missing my entire life. I wanted her to like me, and the fucked up thing is, I still don’t know if that’s entirely vampire hypnosis.

I said she was from space, and I guess that’s not technically true. They’re all from planets, except for Aurora. She was a moon when she was younger, and now she’s a surprisingly fleshy starship. I thought I was either hallucinating from blood loss slash blunt trauma or lingering effects from the Uncanny Violence’s ritual, but no, that was real. I’ve come to like the vaguely disconcerting fleshy bits a lot more though, since the only completely non-organic part of her is Doc Carmilla’s lab. She doesn’t let anyone in there unless she’s going to hurt them, and in that case, you probably don’t want to be in there.

Distance in the Aurora is tricky. She’s huge. Not as big as our moon, which apparently Gunpowder Tim blew up/is blowing up/will blow up, but big. She can also rearrange the corridors more or less however she wants, though you can’t really tell when she’s doing it. Apparently she locked Jonny in a loop for a month after he was mean to her girlfriend, Nastya. Nastya is a human— well, as human as the rest of us— and don’t ask me about how their relationship works. That’s it’s own statement.

I didn’t know this back then. All I knew is that I was going from rubble to bizarre alien corridors with a surprisingly steampunk look to an almost perfectly white lab way too quickly. Nikola was there, which was weird cuz I was pretty sure I’d blown it up at the ritual, but I wasn’t exactly in a state to question it. (Turns out it was just the Toy Soldier. Nikola stole the voice box it was using from it when it was working retail, and it’d apparently decided to take it back when it saw Nikola was dead. As dead as something that was never alive can be anyway. Don’t question it.)

That particular moment of confusion interrupted by panicked stream of inaudible, “waits,” and that was when she’d started strapping me to an operating table, taking measurements, and examining my fucked up leg. She’d poke and prod, and you know what I said about it not hurting as much as I expected? Yeah, that went out the g-ddamn window. I nearly passed out like five different times, probably did a couple of times. I tried counting the seconds, but when I got to a couple thousand, I gave up. She didn’t show any sign of stopping or slowing down. She didn’t even blink or breathe. She’s half blind, apparently. It wasn’t just my leg she fucked with, I’m pretty sure, but it’s all a blur.

The pain made getting shot by a ghost feel like I’d stubbed my toe, and that time, she wasn’t trying to hurt me. I fucked up my teeth pretty badly, I’m pretty sure, though it’s hard to tell. I don’t remember passing out, but I remember waking up on a different bed, certain that something was very wrong and unable to understand the way my body was supposed to move but not knowing why. For a bit there, I was convinced the clowns had won, and the world had gone to hell. Figured if they’d gotten their ritual off, I wouldn’t know it, so things were probably fine. I was in a medical bed, so maybe I’d just gotten beat up in the explosion.

That wouldn’t explain the fact that someone sounding a heck of a lot like the Archivist was screaming his head off. I’ve heard you scream less times than I can count on my fingers and never like that. Jonny d’fucking Ville: He sure knows how to make an impression. He’s an unpredictable bastard and a pain in the ass at the best of times, but I’m pretty sure he actually cares about us, which is more than I can say for most. Well, the Doc loves us but being loved by her... it’s not fun. It hurts like hell. It’s all blood or science with her, and both options leave you a corpse at the end of things. Or worse, affection. I mean, I’ve known I’ve got parental issues for a while now, but damn, being around her really puts that shit under a magnifying glass.

I didn’t see him for a couple of weeks after that. Gunpowder Tim, no relation to Archival Assistant Tim, was there to explain the basics to me, and he made sure to include a gorey example. The Doc’d taken my fucked up leg, he said, and replaced it. My first question was what happened to my original leg, and he just shrugged, which is more than a little disconcerting. She might’ve eaten it? We can don’t age and heal from literally any wound in addition to that, maybe because of that but also maybe not because, in Gunpowder Tim’s own words, “she’s bullshit,” an assessment I have to agree with. Drumbot Brian was trapped in a star for a century, and he’s fine. Not at all as fucked up as I would’ve expected. Well, not from that, anyway. They’re all hellsa fucked up, and I’m starting to get why.

Oh, and the reason for all this? She wanted a backing band. Yeah, we’re Doctor Carmilla & the Mechanisms. Why did I deserve to live forever? Maybe I deserved better than to sacrifice myself to save a world I’d long since stopped caring about? Well, sort of that, but also mostly because I’m a demon on the saxophone and a half decent singer.

The leg’s pretty, I guess, and I’m not sure if it makes it better or worse. It probably doesn’t mean anything at all. There’s words on it that look kind of Japanese, but I can’t understand them. I know most languages now, with a couple of exceptions for whatever Doc Carmilla wants to keep private, because she gets to decide that sort of thing, and we have no say in it.

She waits to hear a yes for anything specific she wants to do with our mechanisms, but she doesn’t give a shit what that actually means, and she never gives us a chance to take it back. The only sort of choice we really have is whether we want it now, when we’re not expecting it, or later, and if we hold out, it always hurts worse, always lasts longer. Sometimes she’ll even give us the treat of deciding who she’ll do it to, but don’t take too long or she’ll take both. This ‘freedom’ lasts about as long as it takes for one of us to fight back, of course.

The others have been good to me. They’ve shot me a bunch of times, but it’s okay because I get to shoot them back. They get me. Even before all this, I was angry. I hate feeling trapped and just because Elias can’t touch me without the other Mechanisms or worse, Doc Carmilla, descending on his ass before he can think to pray to his coward g-d, that doesn’t mean I don’t hear his voice, remember the thoughts that aren’t mine, the fear he pushed into me. And now it’s the same. I don’t know if it’s better or worse, but it’s not good. She pretends she’s a good person, you know? She pretends she’s trying, that it’s just her vampirism that makes her a monster, but she likes hurting us even when her hunger isn’t out of control.

At least Elias didn’t make you think you liked him for it, make you wonder if there was something wrong with you for needing him. I’m so scared, Archivist. Jon. There’s something really wrong with me. The bullet is gone, and I don’t think I’m an avatar. I think this is something else. The others talk about hundreds of thousands of years passing like they’re nothing, and it’s not that I want to die now but all of them do. I can’t help wondering if that’s my fate.

I keep trying to kill Doc Carmilla, no matter how much it hurts, but almost everyone else seems to have given up on the idea of freedom. Apparently the only thing that works for any period of time is flushing her out an airlock, but I can’t begin to imagine the consequences for doing that. It’s already so much. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t want to see you, that’s why I didn’t tell anyone it was me beneath all the makeup and steampunk clothes, but I’m telling you the truth anyway. I guess it’s the All-Seeing Eye, stealing words I’d rather keep inside, and fuck you for that.

Well, I can give you something. There’s a way out of the Archives. Mechanization worked for me, though obviously there’s no way in hell I’m letting you anywhere near the Doc. One, I don’t hate you that much, and two, you and Jonny together would be absolutely insufferable. He’s bad enough with Nastya, and they’re not actually related. But the Doc said there was another way when I asked. Yes, I talked to her on purpose when she said we were going to do a concert in London. She was distracted, though, and didn’t seem to like the idea of me having other connections so I dropped the subject. Apparently you’re not going to like, and maybe knowing it’s not impossible is going to fuck you up worse than resignation to your fate, but hey, it’s out there if you can find it. You can appreciate how awesome of an ex-coworker I am by not looking for me. Don’t go to the show. Don’t do any follow up.

I’m serious. I mean all of you guys, not just the Archivist. Including Martin. She'll probably be able to tell. I know you’re a curious bunch of wankers, kinda have to be to end up here, but if you go to the show, someone’s going to end up dead. And we’ll come back, so it’ll probably hit you harder. I’m included in the group of people who will murder you. We’re not exactly Grifter’s Bone, though I think Jonny’s trying to get us set up for a collab, but we’re dangerous. I’ve killed people. Personally speaking, probably not as many as Daisy yet, but it’s getting up there. The others Mechs have a rap sheet longer than your list of mistakes, and I have absolutely no g-ddamn idea how much death and destruction Doc Carmilla is responsible for. You probably shouldn’t try to comprehend with your All-Seeing Eye powers either; it’ll give you a headache.

You can’t save me, and I don’t want to be saved. These bastards are my family in ways you can’t begin to understand. This planet… It’s not home anymore. Aurora isn’t either, not yet, not with her around, but I belong. I’ve never belonged anywhere before. I like the music and the violence. And the stories they tell. Jon, you can’t imagine the stories they tell. I’ve got so many of my own now; I wear them like a badge of honour in place of the scars our bodies can’t form.

I don’t miss it here. I’m angry and messy, and I don’t fit in the neat lines of words on paper, watching from a distance. I was a fire waiting to burn this place down, taking you all with me, and as much as I hate you for letting this happen to me, I don’t want you dead. It’s better this way. I deserve the stars. I deserve this, Jon.

Statement ends.

Melanie... I don't know what to say. I suppose she doesn't want me to say anything. Hard to believe it's not a sick joke by someone who knows too much about us, especially since she mentions my younger brother, but I Know it's accurate. Jonny and I haven't been close for years, not since he moved to Texas with our father. I grieved when I heard they'd both died, but I barely knew him. If you'd told me he was resurrected by some sort of mad scientist vampire to be part of her band, I would've told you that you were lying or perhaps recalling some strange dream. Even with my current life, the details seem extreme and the timelines don't match up at all. What entities would this even be? The End, because of the relation to mortality, or perhaps the Slaughter, because of the music and violence?

I don't know what to do about this. I suppose it's reassuring to know there's a way out, though the idea that Melanie of all people would describe anyone as worse and more powerful than Elias is... disconcerting. The idea my brother is involved in all this somehow is equally unsettling. From what few childhood memories I have, my brother wasn't particularly happy, but he was far from what she describes. He had a good heart. I don't know if I'm glad he's alive, which is a complicated emotion. The Nastya she mentions sounds like a reference to Case #0151508 I recorded and discarded as ridiculous early on. The connection with Russian history, mentions of space, and reference to a vampire coincidentally named Carmilla? It sounded like someone's novel.

I suppose I should tell the others. They might know more about how to get in touch with her next of kin, if she hasn't done so already. I'll respect her wishes not to attend the concert, despite how very much I wish to see her and my brother again. I'll have Basira do some basic research, double check what we can double check without invading her privacy or, apparently, risking our safety. I wish she'd explained what she meant by 'including Martin.' I hope she's right about being okay.

End recording.


	3. MECH 03 - Queen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Case #0190602. Statement of Georgina Barker, regarding... an old friend's concert she attended. Recorded directly from subject, February 2, 2019.
> 
> Statement begins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Outside perspective on parental abuse, threats of violence, grief.

Georgie here. Melanie said it was okay to come and tell you guys what happened. Well, she told me to since otherwise, “that nosy bastard would start sticking his eyes where someone’s likely to bite them out.” She said that’s the only reason she left me the ticket and the gig details, but I don’t think she was entirely honest about that.

I came back from recording the other day to find a hole in the door to my flat. Someone had quite literally kicked it in, from the shape of the damage, though with what must’ve been supernatural strength. As far as I can tell, there isn’t anything missing, but I haven’t gone through everything yet. All I found was a flyer on my table, advertising a gig for “Doctor Carmilla & the Mechanisms,” a band I’d never heard of, and a ticket.

The picture showed nine people. The woman front and center, I assumed, was Doctor Carmilla. She had dark red hair and sharp teeth, and the rest of them were organized around her. The Toy Soldier reminded me of how Jon described Nikola and the Stranger, except it looked more wood than plastic, and another, one of the singers, looked familiar for reasons I couldn’t place. I learned later that he was Jonny D’Ville, Jon’s secret long-lost brother who stole his name. What really caught my attention was Melanie.

She was near the back and dressed like she was going to a steampunk convention, but it was undeniably her. Ever since she came back from India, she’d walked with a bit of a limp, but that was gone, along with her leg. She’d gotten it replaced with some sort of metal prosthetic. It didn’t look like any I’d ever seen, though I’m not exactly an expert. There was a gun in a holster at her side, and she held a saxophone almost like it was a weapon.

Melanie had left a note on the other side of the flyer. Not anywhere near as detailed as the statement she gave you, though I obviously hadn’t read that yet. She’d written she was okay, that she’d joined a band. She wanted me to come see her, she said, and write an episode for my show about them, even if I never aired it. It might be dangerous, some people would probably die, but I shouldn’t panic if I saw her get shot or burned or anything like that because she’d be okay. She couldn’t die anymore. She promised she’d protect me but couldn’t speak for anyone else that decided to come, especially not anyone from here in a way that made me think the danger would probably come from her specifically.

I’d already started getting ready to go when you called me up in a panic about her statement. I didn’t read it before I went to see her because I didn’t want to have any preconceptions. I know how this place take the worst details and drags them to the surface. I can feel it now, pulling the words out of me. I’m letting it for now. I wanted to see her again. We have a history, and I owed her a bit for recommending Sarah Baldwin, getting her entangled in all this like I did.

I couldn’t tell you where the show was specifically. Not because it wasn’t there afterwards, more that it was entirely different. I went back to the address she gave me this morning and found an entirely different performance space. It wasn’t only that all the signs of violence were gone, the people at Port Mahon in Oxford seemed to have no idea what I was talking about. The band that’d played last night was just some uni project. The shape of the pub was mostly the same during and after the show, but the windows that looked onto an empty street in the light of day had offered a view into the depths of space the night before. I’ve seen pictures of space before, but it was much more beautiful in person. It might’ve been overwhelming, if I could be overwhelmed. Some of the other people who’d attended were staring into the void with this vacant look and others were on the edge of panicking.

I got myself a drink from the bar and asked about the band that’d be playing. The bartender was surprised. Apparently most people were either too confused and scared to ask anything coherent or knew what they were doing, signed all the proper waivers and whatnot.

It was a pretty small venue, as far as these things go, so I managed myself a pretty good seat. When the Mechanisms, sans Doctor Carmilla, came out, the quiet murmur died down.

Jonny D’Ville and Jonathan Sims might not be identical or even look particularly similar, but their voices are recognizably similar. He introduced himself as the Captain, but everyone shouted him down, calling him the First Mate instead, which I joined in on because Melanie’s note had told me to. Also, it was funny.

He introduced Gunpowder Tim as the gunner and the “The Better Tim,” and Ivy Alexandria as “The Better Archivist.” The Toy Soldier, that Stranger creature, didn’t get the honor of anything besides being present. Ashes O’Reilly, their starship’s quartermaster, reminded me a bit of that cop who keeps hanging around the archives. Basira, right? I don’t know what the story with her is. They sounded a bit alike, though, which is funny because Ashes hates cops or something. 

Gunpowder Tim and them are apparently the two most likely to commit arson, by a margin of twenty two percent. There was also Nastya, their engineer who is apparently in a relationship with their starship. Melanie had plenty of details about that, which I didn’t ask for, but she needed to vent about it to someone and all the other Mechanisms have heard it already. Right. Melanie. How do I describe her these days?

Her hair’s grown out more than I would’ve expected from the six months we’d spent apart, from my perspective. Still got traces of that blue dye in it, cutting off at the same point. Apparently time is weird out there in space so they don’t know what point they’ll show up on Earth’s timeline. It’s been at least an Earth year or two from her perspective. She didn’t look any older, and when Gunpowder Tim shot her, the wound healed without any sort of scarring. I didn’t fully believe what she said about immortality or the time difference until I saw that.

She’s their chief of security, which apparently just means she gets to have at least a dozen knives on her at any time as well as several guns. After the show when we got a couple of drinks, she had to take them all off to hug me safely, and that took far longer than I’d have guessed looking at her. She even needed to modify the settings on her leg to keep it from stabbing me, which was a little bit excessive.

She got to keep the tattoo and all the old scars, at the every least, and although her fashion was definitely different, it was still her. Not as many belts as Jonny, but there certainly was more than one. Her boots had stiletto heels, and I’m pretty sure there was a stiletto knife worked in there somehow. She had on this flannel jackets and this pair of goggles around her neck that she might’ve stolen from Gunpowder Tim or vice versa. Her mechanism was exposed, and she was right to call it beautiful. I have no idea how Doctor Carmilla managed to carve something so small, besides, presumably, a lot of practice. She looked healthier than I’d seen her in a while, before she went to work with you guys, and when she sung, she was radiant.

Most of them had a song about their backstory, and Jonny’s was absolutely full of lies if he was at all like our Jon when he was younger. He apparently made up this whole planet called “New Texas,” which was incredibly lazy, and there’s no way in hell their father’s maiden name was something as ironic as Vangelis. It’s really catchy though. Melanie loaded me up with their merch, which surprisingly still exists after the night, and I’ve been listening to their CDs on repeat. They don’t have a studio version of any of the albums with her included yet, but I’ve got the video on my phone.

Everything was going great, basically. There was a lot of violence, don’t get me wrong— Ashes’s backstory involved a lot of arson, and when they set Jonny’s character on fire in the story, they set him on fire on the stage— but mostly it was directed at each other or audience members that were heckling them. They only killed one of the people watching; the rest of the time, it was nonlethal. A couple of them are going to have lifetime damage. I’m not exactly happy about that, but Melanie said that, by the Mechanisms’s standards, the show was relatively tame, so… Yeah.

The tone changed when Doctor Carmilla showed up. Melanie’s note didn’t go into much detail about her, besides mentioning that she saved her life and replaced her leg, but I’ve read her statement since. I understand the Mechanisms’ reactions a lot better now. I’m not scared of anything, but I still know how to recognize fear in other people, and they were scared of her. I almost stepped in, but Melanie glared at me when I started to move. It wouldn’t be me that had to deal with the consequences of whatever I did, after all. I’m only mortal.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that lot before she showed up. After all, working for The Magnus Archives was terrible for her, and it was similarly an evil group headed by a wanker who’d hurt her for their own interests. I’d certainly rather she not be in that position at all. I’d rather nobody be in that position. However, as far as people to be trapped in that situation with, she could do worse than the Mechanisms. Jonny is an abrasive ass, but as far as I can tell, he did everything he could to keep her attention on him. The rest of them, barring the Toy Soldier who I don’t think understood what was going, adjusted to keep her as far away from Melanie as possible.

Doctor Carmilla didn’t do anything outwardly violent on stage, but the others were awfully eager for Melanie to spend the night with me, rather than let her go back to their ship. It was discordant with their previous attitudes. Nastya, who was mostly quiet unless their ship came up, stiffened up and started picking at every single detail, and Jonny started talking too quickly, sometimes stepping backwards when she as much as looked at him. 

Ivy was prone to sprouting off percentages when anyone said anything that could be construed as a question before needed to be prompted all of a sudden, and Ashes’s maintained their demeanor, but they kept flicking their lighter on and off. Drumbot Brian, who wasn’t actually playing the drums for some reason, stayed mostly the same, but the others reacted less to his comments. Gunpowder Tim got louder, more aggressive, which was odd because he’d already been pretty loud and aggressive. And Melanie...

I’m not going to talk about how she was. Your fear god or whatever the Eye is doesn’t get to have that. Not from me.

That was mostly during the gaps between songs, though. The actual performances were still beautiful, and they smiled like everything was fine. Like it was the same as before, and they were safe. Melanie took center stage as vocalist for what was probably supposed to be a deeply disconcerting performance of Homesick. The lyrics were a bit different than off the album, a bit more specific to Melanie. I didn’t know how good she was. I’d heard her hum a little bit, but she used to be so self conscious about that. I’m glad she’s opened up on that front.

It was pretty late by the time they put their instruments away, but Melanie didn’t seem too affected by the late hour. After she finished helping to pack up the instruments, she came over to my table, and we caught up. She was curious about how you all were holding up, though I didn’t have too many answers. If anything, she seemed to know more. Apparently Martin and Basira are “being dumbasses” and their plans are terrible, but she definitely doesn’t care about them anymore, not her, she’s a mean space pirate now. (She definitely still cares about you.)

Jonny said to call our Jon “a fucking nerd” for him or he’d kill me, so I said I would. Here’s that, I guess. Jon: You’re a fucking nerd. He said he liked me, so I could live for now. Melanie gave me a knife and told me to stab him. I was mostly bemused at the whole encounter. I think Nastya was trying to threaten me to not break Melanie’s heart, but it was somewhat ineffective, since I didn’t really understand it. I don’t think Melanie told them I couldn’t feel fear? She was trying not to laugh the whole way through.

Doctor Carmilla had left as mysteriously as she’d appeared. Halfway through my conversation with Melanie, she came back. I was in the middle of a question about her when Melanie froze, and I asked if she was right behind me. Melanie nodded, and I sighed. How are space vampires so quiet? Her hands were wet with fresh blood. Not enough that she was making a mess but enough in at such an angle that made me pretty sure she’d just killed someone. She gave me a once over and nodded at Melanie, who smiled weakly. I’m fairly certain that was the closest I’ve ever come to death, and I don’t know if that includes my encounter with the dead woman from uni.

We left together shortly after that. I was fine, but Melanie didn’t want to be there anywhere, especially not since the show was over, so we went back to my place. She’s back on the Aurora now, but she said next time they made it to the UK, she’d make a point of checking in with me. It probably wouldn’t be too long from my perspective, but she promised she’d have lots of new stories to tell and songs to sing. Maybe centuries worth, now wouldn’t that be exciting! I suggested she try to stay for a little while, but she had this sad look in her eyes, and I knew it was more than fear of Doctor Carmilla. She didn’t want to stay, even if she wanted me. She swore she wouldn’t forget me, no matter what happened. I guess I didn’t realize how much I meant to her.

I’m surprisingly okay with it. I‘m going down a list she gave me, of people who deserve to know why she’s gone. There are... less people on here than I would’ve thought. Her search for answers took a heavy toll on her relationships. The other Mechanisms sounded like they really cared about her. I hope they understand how lucky they are to get to know her.

Statement ends.

Recording ends.


	4. MECH 04 - Shattered Mirror

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Case #0190603. Statement of Jonny d’Ville, regarding... the newest member of his crew. Original statement given February 3, 2019. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.
> 
> Statement begins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Parental abuse, parental neglect, mentions of alcoholism, isolation, self harm and suicide from the perspective of an immortal, graphic descriptions of violence, partial mind control, medical torture, dubiously consensual science, trauma, hopelessness, hypocrisy, the same vibes as being quarantined with an abuser, depression, eating disorder.

It sure has been a while since I checked in on my little bro, hasn’t it been. I figured I’d see you at the concert, but Melanie said she’d explicitly forbidden you from showing up because she figured one of us would probably shoot you. Most likely her or me, which is absolutely fucking fair. I’m not exactly the best with expressing my feelings without resorting to violence, so I figured maybe your dumb ass magic eye god or whatever would like to help out. I can feel it. Pisses me right off, but now I’ve gotten started, I can’t exactly leave the tale half told. I’ll punch your boss in the face before I leave. Maybe smash his head in with a pipe.

Oh, he’ll be fine, don’t worry. I’d tell you his little secret, but between you, the eldritch fear god, and me, I’m sure it’ll make a much better story for you to have to figure it out on your own. Besides, it’s funny to imagine you flipping your lid as you realize I know something you don’t. You always were such a know-it-all. I said it’d get you in trouble one day, and I certainly was not wrong. You said the same thing about my temper, though, so I figure we were both right, in our own childish ways.

It’s fucking bizarre I remember all this, now that I think about it. My teenaged years are mostly a blur. I moved to Texas with our father, as you know, and you got stuck with Gran. She’d be dead by now, I reckon, though I could hardly give less of a shit. She didn’t like either of us much, that I remember, but neither did our parents so it’s not like there were any better options. Still, she probably didn’t have much of a gambling addiction unless it was to fucking Bingo. You lucked out on that one.

That alcoholic motherfucker shoulda known better than to have gotten mixed up in half the business he did, but we both musta inherited his shitty decision making skills, cuz by the time I was eighteen, I had one hell of a rap sheet. No where near as long as mine now— I hear some fools back in Yggsadril still play drinking games with it and a handful of them even survive the process— but I was a familiar figure to the local cops. When dear old dad turned up dead, well, I was the prime suspect. Especially since I disappeared right after.

Did I kill him? That’s for the Doc to know, I suppose. Melanie probably told you all about her, but I’ll give you the abridged version: most tenacious motherfucker in the goddamn galaxy. She probably figured out the secret to immortality or whatever by annoying Death so much they left her alone. Forever. And she had the audacity to drag us along with it cuz she was bored or something. She’ll call us her family, like she didn’t basically kidnap us. Sure, my heart had stopped, and I was basically already dead, but that doesn’t exactly make me free real estate for her fucked up medical shit. The Doc says she asked and insists I said yes, but it’s not like anyone can exactly confirm or deny that.

From your perspective, it’s been, what, ten years? From mine, try... ten thousand, and I’m rounding down here. She’s been on our ass the entire time. You think that boss you’ve got is bad? Wait till he’s the only person you’ve known for longer than about a week or so for hundreds of years. It was just me, and Doc Carmilla for about that long. I stopped keeping specific track, considering all the times she pulled shit that made me miss months. Mouthing off is fine, until suddenly it’s not, and you’re trapped in a fucking broom closet for a full year. By the time you’re out, you’re practically begging her to forgive you, even if you still mean what you said in the first place. That is, assuming you remember it. Wanna know the best part? I’m not referring to a specific instance here. She pulls that crap often enough I lose track over which ‘offense’ goes to which punishment.

Well, it wasn’t exactly like I was completely alone those first centuries. Aurora was there. She’s our starship and our engineer’s girlfriend. Don’t ask, it’s worse than it sounds. She’s nice enough, though it’s not like she could hurt the Doc. Apparently coding restraints for her’s easier than on us, which pisses Nastya off, but it’s not like she’s going to do anything about it. Not like she can. At least the Doc seems to think they make a cute couple, as insufferable as it is. I don’t need any of that star crossed bullshit on my ship. We’re a tragic enough lot as is.

Anyway, Aurora was good, but I never figured out how to talk to her like Nastya did when she showed up. Guess I’m not cute enough or some shit like that. Nastya says she gave her statement a while back, so I won’t rehash that old story for her, but let’s just say I wasn’t exactly composed when Doc Carmilla introduced her as a sister. Whatever happened next probably wasn’t great. I appear to have blocked it entirely out of my memory. I don’t think Nastya knows what happened then either, so like, can’t ask her, and I’m not gonna ask the Doc. She’d get all curious, and she’s worst when she’s curious. Besides, considering all the shit I can remember? Probably wasn’t that great.

As much as I loathe to admit it, Nastya’s presence did make some things easier. Less lonely, for one thing. If you let Doc Carmilla read this, by the way, I’ll actually murder you. Then I’ll murder everyone you know. I’ll do my research, find the local barista you like just a little bit more and kill them. Maybe I won’t stick to just people you like. That asshole up in research, the one who’s always on your ass about the dress code despite the fact your position is higher than his, and can’t he tell, you’re special? You always want to tell him the truth, don’t you? That he can’t leave? That you’re both trapped here? I’ll kill him too, and don’t you worry, it won’t be quick.

I don’t care if she gives you a choice or not, I’ll destroy your goddamn life. The fact we’re relatives doesn’t mean shit, I’ve lost every ounce of blood in my body more times than you can count with your special magic powers, and you just sit back and watch, you motherfucker. I’ll kill everyone, might depopulate this fucking city just to make sure you get the fucking point: She. Does. Not. See. This.

Well, I’ll probably let Georgie live. She’s a riot. Why the hell did you break up with her, by the way? It’s not like you had to worry about incompatible life spans. It’s probably for the best, cuz this way someone remotely worthy of her — that’s Melanie— gets to date her instead. Or whatever it is they’re doing. I don’t know if it’s going to work out, hell, it probably won’t, but who am I to say what’s impossible? Time’s weird out in space, particularly at the speeds we like to travel.

Drumbot Brian knows the most about it, excluding Doc Carmilla, but he’s a robot and off by a couple months at best. Once we went on a weekend trip while this sick ass revolution was going on and ended up fighting World War I on the moon, three thousand years in the future ago. Not that I minded, of course, though that’s where we found Gunpowder Tim. Not your assistant, Melanie’s been calling him Axe Tim, Worse Tim, and Better Tim at random intervals. I’ll stick to Gunpowder and Axe, as I’m not sure who I want to roast more. I actually liked Gunpowder Tim when I first met him. Well, more like, when his bestie died and he went a little bit… how do I say it? Absolutely apeshit. Doc Carmilla didn’t let the fucker die when he blew up the goddamn moon, that absolute madman, of course.

Thinking about it now, a whole lot of our backstories seem to involve explosions or arson of some variety. Nastya didn’t set any fires or whatever, not the first time, but I’m pretty sure the Cyberian revolutionaries burned her house down, so, close enough. Melanie blew up a creepy ass circus, you know? It sounds awesome when she talks about it. I’m definitely not a huge fan of the Uncanny Violence. The Toy Soldier’s impossible to get rid of. It listens to every order except for, “leave us a fucking lone.” On the plus side, she got rid of a bunch of fucked up mannequins or whatever. On the negative side, she got TS back the voice box that it uses. It’s good to have its harmony back, but, damn, I was not missing the constant refrain of, “Jolly Good,” to shit that’s most definitely not jolly good.

I guess you knew her first, huh? Well, she’s ours now, and you might be my brother, but you sure as hell ain’t my bro, if you know what I mean. She’s one of us, through and through. She’s bled with us, by us, and for us, and if you hurt her again, then that threat I mentioned above, about what would happen if Doc Carmilla saw this, that goes double. Not exactly sure how I’d be able to double, murder everyone you know, but trust me when I say I’ll figure it out when the time comes. I’d say I’d go through and kill all of your assistants’ loved ones, but they don’t seem to have many. Jesus, ya’ll’s lives are so fucking empty. All you have is the pain and suffering of others. Don’t even have the decency to die, just suffer and suffer and suffer like a wanker. At least I’ve got some friends.

Melanie gives at least somewhat of a shit about you, which I don’t get at all, but she hasn’t been immortal for very long. It’s been… three years? Like I said, time is different out in space. If I’m remembering the names right, Einstein said something like that, except he was wrong on all the details that matter. We show up at places when it’s relevant. Nastya’ll tell you something about all the complicated physics and can explain all the individual jumps, but she’s full of it. It’s about the story, and you guys here have one hell of a story. We wouldn’t be back so quickly otherwise. The first couple of months with her were, well, a mess. I’ll be the first to admit adding a new Mechanism throws the Aurora into disarray while we try to figure out how to deal with them. I’ll say I gave up on expecting any better of Doc Carmilla back at the beginning, when she turned Nastya into one of us, and yet, I’m so fucking surprised every time she drags a new idiot into that lab of hers.

To Melanie’s credit, she didn’t go quietly. Leg crushed to bits under a mountain of steel, hours of blood loss, and the full focus of Doc Carmilla’s good mom act, and she was still kicking and screaming the whole way. Most of us were too out of it to fight back at all, either that or too entranced by whatever bullshit vampire powers she has. I’m sure she has them. Some sort of hypnosis that makes you love her. She’s got too. It’s the only way half the events of the last thousand years make any sense. Melanie’s stronger than the rest of us.

She came out of that lab a couple weeks later. Gunpowder Tim was there to fill her in on the details, though now that I’m thinking about it, Brian might’ve been a better choice. He’s not the ‘nice’ one, exactly, so get that fucked up idea out of your head. He’s as much of as a liar and bastard as the rest of us. He hides it better, though, and can usually hold a civil conversation. Still, it seems like it went well enough. As well as anything can, when the Doc’s around.

Melanie was pretty depressed there for a while, all hopeless and mopey. She has no idea just how much the rest of us compensated for her in those early months. Doc Carmilla’s so happy when we volunteer, she’ll even undergo using a brand new patient with brand new biology to fuck with if we pretend we really want to help. Not that Melanie noticed, she was so wrapped up in her own bullshit. It took me stabbing Doc Carmilla with one of her own scalpels to wake Melanie up.

Not that she was asleep, but she kept staring at walls. She barely ate or drank, and although we might not be able to die from that sort of thing, we certainly feel it. Not that Doc Carmilla remembers to stock the kitchen with anything remotely edible, but we know to loot enough grocery stores when we’re planet-side and hide the loot in places she won’t find and use for science. Ashes was getting close to tying her down and forcing her to eat, and they’re one of the most patient of all of us.

So, yeah, I stabbed the Doc. She wanted to do something comparing the two of us, her earliest Mechanism and her most recent one, and I couldn’t figure out another way to stop her. Not that stabbing her stopped her for good, more annoying her than anything, but if I could annoy her then maybe she’d hold off on fucking with Melanie for a bit longer. It was inevitable, of course, I’d seen the exact same thing happen every goddamn time she dragged a poor unsuspecting soul into her mess, but I’d delay that as long as possible, in any way I could. Melanie was one of us by definition, but she wasn’t one of us yet. Nobody deserves that.

That woke Melanie right up. I coulda sworn I’d attacked Doc in front of her before, but apparently not, because that seemed to give her an idea. Before the Doc could do anything to me, she just went apeshit. Grabbed anything she could find with a sharp edge and started stabbing. I’m pretty sure she started carving a stake at some point to try to do the whole traditional Earth vampire murder thing. Obviously it didn’t work, and we both ended up on the table anyway, but this time she was struggling the whole time, and I saw this look in her eyes that reminded me of myself in the early days. I told her it wasn’t going to work afterwards, but she clearly didn’t care.

During those months of depression or whatever it was that’d come over her, she’d apparently nurtured quite the grudge, and hell, I wasn’t exactly to say it wasn’t justified. She was happy to be alive at that point, wanted to know if the Doc could kill us, but when I said probably not, she decided she wanted be a major problem. She said she wanted to make the Doc wish she could, and I told her good luck on that front, I’d had thousands of years of experience trying, but that was a challenge and soon we were hard at work being nuisances. I have to say, I’ve missed being such a pain in the ass. We were trying to play nice to keep her from taking it out on Melanie, but hey, if Melanie was cool with taking the fall out now, then I was ready to do the opposite of play ball. We had our Chief of Security!

Except for the excruciating pain when she catches on to something, these past years have been brilliant. Ashes is always up for a little bit of inconveniently located fire, and since they’re the only one of us that can actually get away with lying to Doc Carmilla’s face, they made it a good half year before she realized they were involved. Nastya played hide and seek with her for a whole month once, after she snuck into her lab and messed up some important science.

Of course, she managed to pick the exact part of the lab that the Doc uses to synthesis some sort of vampiric supplement, so she got hungry and went on a bloodthirsty rampage before we could get her to a planet with some unsuspecting mortals for her to chomp on, but hey, she really hates losing her shit like that. It’s embarrassing, apparently. We try not to fuck with her feeding too much, cuz it’s really not worth it, but hey, that’s another experiences Melanie had to check off her reverse bucket list one of these days.

We threw her out the airlock right before we came here. Wanted to give Melanie to say her goodbyes, since it’s rare any of us get a chance to. She showed up at the show, of course, and we didn’t manage to keep the blame off Melanie, even though it wasn’t actually her who’d did it. Georgie helped delay the Doc a little bit, brought Melanie to her place after the gig, and I’m sure they had a wonderful time. Honestly, I was a bit surprised the Doc didn’t kill Georgie for it. She was real close, though.

Now, you’re probably wondering: Is Melanie going to okay? The answer is: No! Of course not! We’re fucked! Really, really, fucked! She hates getting stuck in space! Who the hell knows how long it’s been from her perspective? What, are you surprised or something? Has any part of what I said suggested this was a safe course of action. This whole campaign has been downright suicidal, and none of us can fucking die. We were going to reach the point where the Doc stopped seeing this as funny or cute and force us to stop, one way or another, and we can’t exactly die, so use your goddamn imagination.

This isn’t okay! None of this is fucking okay! Your assistant traded one nightmare of a job for another, and we’re only safe at concerts or when there’s an interesting story going on. This is our mandatory interlude into your story, though, and we’re no longer just the fucking watchers, so there’s consequences. There’s. Always. Consequences. You’re trapped, same as I am, you’ve gotta know that. Not that you’d ever have the guts to fight back like we do. You’re scared of what Elias will say? You think Peter will whoosh you away into the Lonely? Oh wait, you’ve got assistants to take shit like that for you. Goddamnit, Jon, take care of them. They’re the only ones who would have any reason to care about you, though I'm sure you've already burned those bridges too badly.

Daisy’s alive, by the way. Not that you’d bother to go look for her, you coward. You piece of shit. Coma my ass, you were scared to die or become like us. Well, that’s some shit luck you’ve got there, cuz the coin settled on life, and you’re a monster now. Enjoy it, cuz there’s no way to go back, and take care of the people you’ve dragged with you. I’ll be here, taking care of the one you left behind. You abandoned her, and now the Doc has her, and there’s nothing I can do for her! All because of you. You piece of shit. I’d tell you to get up off your cowardly ass and go to hell, but you’re already there. Fuck. You.

Statement ends.

Well, that was… disconcerting, to say the least. I don’t think I’ve ever told myself to go to hell so emphatically before. Melanie said he was a lot, but... I didn't think he would be that much. I was putting off reading this statement because I knew it'd be something like this, but I shouldn't have waited. That was, uh, cowardly of me.

Melanie... I'm so sorry. If there was something I could do, anything I could do... I shouldn't have let her come with us. I should've stepped in sooner, asked about her leg, or something. Anything, really. I feel so powerless, sitting here. Daisy's alive-- I need to tell Basira. Damnit, couldn't he give me more details? I can't See her-- oh. Oh. That's not dead. That's something else, but where?

If he wanted me to do something, he should've said what I could do. If I'm such a monster now, why can't I do anything with that? Melanie doesn't want me to help; she doesn't think I can. Forget whooshing me away to the Lonely, I can't find Peter Lukas at all, and Elias is in prison. Does my little brother want me to steal Tim's axe and just swing away at the Lukas-shaped mist until something hits, or what? I can't do anything if nobody tells me what to do.

I'm going to lie down, and, uh, breathe, before I break the news to Basira. And I suppose... I'll try not to Look for Melanie.

End recording.


	5. MECH 05 - The Shadow Of The Moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Well, Jon is off chasing down some loose ends for now, and Axe Tim— wow, d’Ville wasn’t kidding about that nickname being catchy— practically threw this at me. Not sure how he found it, but more information on these Mechanisms can’t hurt. Might as well record it. At this point, tales of future moon trench war sound all too plausible.
> 
> Statement of Joan Le Fanu, regarding their experience in The War To End All Wars on the moon. Statement number 0132801, 28th November, 5013. Statement begins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Quarantine blues, hopelessness, apocalypse, loss of a loved one, trench warfare, chemical warfare, economic hardship, military service.

She said said this is where you tell your stories. She said you can stay for as long as you want, that you won’t hunger for anything, as long as you tell your stories, and I am so very hungry. I am tired of running. If this unnatural artifice of normalcy, of academia, will take my tales, I will offer it everything. The flood is still, chunks of the skies rain down, and I will offer the Archives everything.

I know why the moon is gone. And not just the official story, about a malfunction with the Kaiser’s canon, oh no, I know why it is gone, and it was not a mistake. It was malice, bloodthirsty but simple. A tale as old as time, that’s what he’ll tell you, two boys go to war and only one makes it out, changed irrevocably, and he’ll tell it to you with a crooked smile as he douses your feeble shelter with gasoline and lets his sibling light the matches. But I know why the moon is gone. I knew him, you see, the man who doomed our world.

Gunpowder Tim, that’s what they call him these days. They must’ve added the first bit later on, because he wasn’t all sparks and explosions when I first met him. He was a scrappy kid, Decent enough shot, I’ll give young Tim that, but he was always so self conscious. By the time he got around to pulling the trigger, the enemy was long gone. He might’ve had a sense of humor, if he wasn’t so damned self conscious. He’d flush at the slightest hint of an off-colour joke, even when he was the one who’d said it. A stiff wind coulda knocked him over, unless he was with his best friend. Not that they were separated much.

Those two were attached at the hip. Bertie, that was his friend’s name. He was a year or two older and a good deal sturdier. One hell of a mother hen too, always checking in on everyone in the unit and making sure we’d eaten. A decent hand at cards, though he always seemed to lose when he was up against Tim. Tim was his soft spot, and we all knew it. They’d signed up together for some damned reason, never did figure out why. They kept each other sane, or, as sane as possible, considerin we were in a war and all.

As for me, I was an unlucky fool. Or maybe a lucky one, I don’t know. I never made a friend like that. The closest thing I had was a couple of bastards I didn’t mind too much when they’d die, over and over, but I’d gotten my grieving out of the way at the start. I hadn’t signed up cuz I believed in Queen and country or anything like that. My family wasn’t getting by, you see, we were starving.

My father had been keeping us afloat for years, and he’d told me to go get myself an education. He wanted me to be something more than the another nobody. I was going to be a doctor, but a year into my studies, he fell sick. Nothing fatal, not with treatment, but he couldn’t keep working, so, well, that was it. His boss said it was a pity to see him go, that he was one of the best, but it’s not like the bastard offered anything to help out. Didn’t compensate for the years my father spent working at his factory.

Without a steady source of income, I couldn’t afford school, so I had to go home. I poked around for jobs, even spent a short stint at the same factory father worked for, but I wasn’t any good. Kept getting fired for being a disruptive influence here, a reckless idiot there. Maybe I was. It pissed me off, you know? One little accident and my life was over. When the recruiters came round, I put my name on the list. I’d gotten enough learning while I was at school that I could be useful. My stipend wasn’t much, but it could pay for the treatments. Keep them going till father was back on his feet.

I was assigned to the same unit as our star crossed lads, and we were out there on the front lines. Things went as well as war could possibly go for a few months, and by that, I mean they were absolute shit. Living in constant fear, keeping one ear pealed for the telltale sound of an alarm open at all bloody hours, it does something to a man. I’d seen comrades come and go, and it wasn’t usually as quick as a laser bullet to the head, let me tell you. I still hear the sound of the alarms some days, sure this is the time I’m not gonna make it to a respirator or a lead sheet. Except I always did. It was the others that died, scream caught in their chest. It was blood and shit, and we were up our necks in it.

Tim and Bertie, they went on about keeping everyone’s spirits up, but I said they were fools. We just needed to accept we were already dead, then it wouldn’t hurt when it happened. I don’t know if I was that bad before I came, but war sure didn’t make me feel any better. It didn’t help that I had a nasty fear of the dark and cold. I don’t know if I ever got over it, really, or if I adjusted to being scared all the time. You heard stories about soldiers wandering off in the tunnels, all dazed, and something getting them. Something unnatural.

Probably camp fire nonsense. I knew there was plenty to worry about without tales of ghosts, though I can’t say I ever strayed too far from the others. As annoying as they were, as fragile as they were, they were something. Something I coulda sworn I’d stopped giving a shit about.

Well, hopelessness worked decent enough until Jonny d’Ville showed up a few months in. He said he was new to these parts, but he picked up on all the little tricks so quickly, I coulda sworn he was teaching me more often than I was him. He was reckless as hell, but always seemed to make it out of whatever scrap he’d get himself into.

He agreed with me about living like we were dead, I’m pretty sure, though with that messed up laugh of his, it was hard to tell. He’d laugh at anything, especially shit that wasn’t funny, and if alcohol wasn’t being rationed as strictly as it was, I coulda sworn he was almost always drunk out of his mind. He wore his uniform wrong, in a way I could never seem to put a finger on. Nothing I could think of was specifically out of place, but I just knew it wasn’t right. Maybe it was a couple of centimeters too big for him, or maybe it always seemed to be covered in bullet holes that must not have hit d’Ville somehow. Luckiest fucker I’d ever met.

D’ville made an art of finding new ways to piss off the usually quiet Tim. Bertie tried to step between them, get them to take it easy but keeping the two of them from ripping each other to shreds was like herding cats, and there weren’t any goddamn cats on the fucking moon. The tunnels weren’t big enough for the three of them, and I’d sit around watching them go for hours in between bombardments.

It became a twisted sort of routine. Anything, even genuine hatred —and I’ll be the first to tell you that they genuinely hated each other— can become normal with enough time. There’s a bond you develop with your unit that’s unlike anything you had before or will have after. You can’t help getting attached to the fools you share that tiny lead sheet with, no matter how much you want to their throats out and get them to stop caring so much.

I don’t remember when the singing started or who was to blame. It sure wasn’t me, though. I’d rather they’d’ve shut the fuck up. Then again, I joined in after a couple of weeks. It was a pain, hearing that din when I was trying to sleep, so I just gave up on trying to sleep through it. Resistance is futile, apparently, especially when you deal with folks as stubborn as Tim turned out to be. He’d fold on anything, except for this. What a bastard. Nightly renditions of “Gassed Last Night” and other thrillingly original tunes continued for about a year and a half.

I miss that version of him sometimes. Turns out, I’d fucked up pretty badly. See, I’d thought I’d managed to purge myself of all “giving a shit about other people,” but apparently I was wrong. Even found myself worrying for d’Ville, though now I’m pretty sure I didn’t need to.

Things were fine for those two and a half years. As stressful as ever, but I’d started to let myself care. They’d wormed their way into my heart, and if they’d lasted this long, I argued to myself, well, they might as well make it all the way through. I was fooling myself, of course, and if I had a chance, I’d go back in time and beat myself to a bloody pulp just to make it clear how stupid that was. Bertie died, you see. Just like any other fool. No, worse, because it wasn’t like any other fool. It was noble. I’m almost jealous of him. At least he didn’t have to see all this.

It was the middle of the night, after we’d all managed to finally fall asleep. I was dreaming of sirens, so it took me a while to realize that the alarms were blaring in real life too. One of our respirators had broken the week before, and we’d been trading off the privilege of who gets to risk their life relying on the pumps. The last couple of attacks had been microwave, and before that, Bertie and I had taken our turns. We’d gotten lucky, and it turned out okay, but now it was d’Ville’s turn. The rest of us had ours own quickly.

We knew right away the pumps wouldn’t be able to handle it. They barely made a dent in the oncoming cloud, offering maybe a mouthful or two of fresh air. The tunnels were thick with yellow. You could barely see your hands in front of your face, and even the sound of screams was swallowed. The last thing I saw was d’Ville’s wide eyed and toothy grin, and I heard him laughing as Bertie tackled him down to the ground. They were pretty far back, so they had maybe an extra minute of warning on us? Hard to say, since mustard gas spreads quickly.

Tim was by my side, and I could practically feel his panic attack through the layers of uniform. I didn’t know what to do or how to help, since it was usually Bertie he was stuck with at times like these, so I just held his hand. Tried for the same sort of comfort Bertie offered. I was unsurprisingly shit at it, since the last person I’d touched on person had to be, what, my father? Right before enlisting? Yeah, that sounds about right. Besides, my touch seemed to remind him of how far away his best friend was, and I couldn’t exactly reassure him when I wasn’t sure he’d be okay either.

Turns out, he wasn’t. The gas wasn’t fully dissipated yet, but when Tim began to be able to see again, he sprinted over to where Bertie and d’Ville had fallen. And the respirator that we’d all agreed was Bertie’s for the night was shoved over d’Ville’s face.

Bertie wasn’t dead yet, but I’d seen enough people get caught in mustard gas to know he was on his way out. His face was covered in blisters, all layered on top of each other and popping, and he tried to scream through choked lungs. His eyes were bloated, the veins inside them bulged, and he couldn’t force them shut, though he sure tried. Tim was sobbing, more of a mess than I’d seen him this entire time. The bubbles of flesh writhed across his skin, up and down, and I wasn’t sure if the world was blurred or if that was my tears. That was about when Tim snapped, I think.

Well, snap implies he was fine and then he was enraged. It wasn’t like that, though. Throughout our months together, I’d noticed anger starting to boil beneath his surface. His fights with d’Ville might not have turned fatally violent, and I do think he started to care about the bastard eventually, but they were getting longer and longer. Especially when we all started to notice that d’Ville recovered so quickly. He was always in fighting shape by the next day. Bertie’s ability to pull him back got weaker and weaker.

When we managed to get one up on a Lenny, Tim’s reaction turned from guilt to satisfaction and then, after Bertie’s death, it morphed into downright sadistic glee, so much more like d’Ville than the quiet kid I’d met at the start. Different, though. Less prone to laughing, and he didn’t get stuck in the same way. Where d’Ville wouldn’t stop shooting a corpse, Tim would barely check to see if his bullets hit the mark. We spent few weeks like that, my only two remaining comrades absolutely crazy. That’s about when I finally confronted my feelings.

I’d realized I’d cared about Bertie. A lot. I missed him, and I was torn up about his death, but the way d’Ville and Tim were going, they’d be dead soon too. I sent in a request for leave. I’d received a letter about my father recently, saying he’d taken a turn for the worst, and they accepted that as my reason. I know they’d only get worse without me to hold them back, and part of me hoped they’d raze that cursed satellite to the ground. Now I realized I was grieving for Bertie, I remembered all the other people I’d lost there, and I was inconsolable.

I’d barely gotten settled in at the family home, started to understand that the fear wasn’t going to be gone just because my body wasn’t in danger anymore, when the moon exploded. I’d thought it was a dream. Maybe a nightmare. Really, I just had no idea what to think. It didn’t make any sense. I’d said I’d wanted it all to go away before, but I’ didn’t actually think it would happen. Went through a dark period there where I’d blamed myself for it all, somehow, despite how absurd that sounds.

It started with the meteors. Thousands of them. Millions of them. I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. I’m a uni drop out that joined the military. All I know is that it was bad. They were everywhere. Most were too small and burned up before they hit, but when they did, they did hard and fast.

Sometimes they’d land in forests and set fires that consumed miles. Sometimes a big chunk would wipe out a whole neighborhood or a factory that was producing some vital resource for the rest of us. The people on the ground were already on rations, and there really wasn’t much excess to go around. My family lived out in the country, but the hospital my father was staying at was in downtown London, which was hit pretty badly early on. We never heard from him again, and I know that even if he’d survived the initial bombardment, he wouldn’t have made it without the medical care they were providing.

I wasn’t much of a help in those early days, I have to admit. It was all my brothers could do to keep me moving, when the sound of an oncoming meteor would send me into flashbacks for hours. That night the moon disappeared never ended either. Our Earth was off its axis, and I picked up enough at school to know that meant we were fucked, even if the crops weren’t dying. We had some sort of idea to try to make it to the other side of the world, which logic suggested would be in perpetual sun.

There’s no tide anymore. I don’t know why that fucks me up so much. We rarely went to the sea before the moon exploded. But I had been there, and I know it’s not supposed to be that still. A gentle wind can push the waves one way or another, but that’s just it. Empty. Wrong. Disconnected from the rest of the world.

We didn’t even make it to the mainland. My family was killed one by one, picked off by the various forces that occupied our now moonless existence. Sasha, the youngest, fell sick pretty early on, and the little medical knowledge I’d picked up told me that there was nothing I could do. That didn’t mean I didn’t try. I tried so damn hard, but he died anyway. Micheal, the eldest, was next. He got this idea in his head that we’d be able to survive if we got “tough.” He got into fights whenever he could, and it reminded me too much of Tim and d’Ville for me to stop him. He got himself killed trying to rob some other travelers.

Alex, my other younger brother, and I stopped trying to find the sun after that. We found an area relatively untouched by the meteors, one with a decent enough temperature and hopefully far enough away from any of the brand new or suddenly reactivated volcanos. We gave up, really, on trying to live. This world was dead. We’d make as much of a home as we could, and maybe we’d die together. Starvation, maybe dehydration. Or sickness. I didn’t want the last thing as knew to be violence. I’d lived with that for so damn long; I didn’t want to die in it either.

We scavenged. We traded what we had with passer-byes. Our nutrition was terrible, I’m sure, but we were used to going hungry. It was cold and dark but predictable. We had each other and that was almost enough. At least we could pretend things were okay. I told him about all the people I’d lost, eventually, and we cried. We cried a lot. The flashbacks didn’t get any better, but they stopped getting worse. I probably would’ve developed a substance abuse problem, if there were any substances around.

I don’t know how long we were there for. There were a couple of old clocks, but we slept when we were tired instead of trying to keep to a schedule. We got out of sync quickly, though we tried to be there for each other. He was asleep when they came, and I was awake. I heard their approach.

The Mechanisms, that’s what they called themselves. Renegades and thieves, liars and killers. They said they were immortal, and their first mate shot himself in the head to prove it when I said he was full of shit. See, I recognized him. I knew he was as mortal as the next fool, cuz Bertie had died for him, and he wouldn’t have let that happen if he really couldn’t die. He laughed and laughed and laughed, just like he did in the tunnels, and this time, Gunpowder Tim was laughing right along. There wasn’t the same spark of fear in his eyes. There wasn’t anything there at all.

There were five of them, not including those two. One was made of metal and gave me this sad but knowing smile, like he was watching a tragedy, and I was the king sprouting soliloquies about how trustworthy my heir was, and another was almost familiar. Reminded me of someone I’d sworn I’d seen on the front lines.

A queer chap, with a mustache that looked drawn on and cheery red cheeks. They called it Toy, and I remembered hearing a story about the human doll that’d do anything you asked, passed around the camp fire. d’Ville always laughed at those. I didn’t pay much attention to those tales, and especially not to his reaction, cuz d’Ville was laughing at everything, especially shit that wasn’t funny.

The quietest was cold, both in the way she looked me over and in her body. A meteor had landed only a couple of hours ago and started a nasty fire that was getting worryingly close. It was the warmest it’d been in a while. But she was shivering like it was the dark of winter, something I’d started to worry about as the summer seemed to be drawing to a close, and I could see her breath in the air. She wore a thick coat, dark blue, and stood a step behind d’Ville.

She was practically opposite of Ashes o’Reilly, who ran hot as could be. They introduced themself to me rather politely, though I knew it wasn’t for anything nice. It was about credit. Whatever they did, they wanted me to know it was them, and what they did was burn. They smelled like gasoline when they offered their hand out for me to shake. I took it, of course, and I’m half surprised they didn’t burn me right then. Maybe they thought it’d be funnier to let me live, to turn around and see their last member, their “Archivist” cutting my only surviving brother open.

It was such a tiny cut too. I thought, no, I hoped I’d managed to fight her off, with my maddened blows, but I knew none of them connected properly. Even the cold one was cracking a grin at my attempts at a defense. Ashes smiled all full of teeth, and Tim clapped. He cheered me on, with a sort of enthusiasm that I don’t think I’d ever seen from him. I screamed at him and d’Ville to help me. I begged, I ordered. Their Toy moved to try to help at first, but d’Ville hissed at it to stay back, and I guess he had more authority or something.

I threw sloppy punch after sloppy punch. It’d been so long since basic training, I’m sure I’d I managed to hit her, I would’ve broken the bones in my hand. I wasn’t thinking about the immortality d’Ville mentioned, even though I was covered in his blood and brains. I wasn’t thinking at all. She was always one step outside of my range. I never once saw the knife she must’ve used. She must’ve stabbed him. She wasn’t there, and he was fine, then I turned, and she was over his fallen body, the littlest cut. She danced more than dodged, I swear, and I couldn’t keep up.

Their Archivist retreated eventually. She curtsied as she returned to her friends and said something I couldn’t make out, all while I sobbed in the dirt I’d collapsed into as she moved. I cradled Alex, and d’Ville said something to Tim, and he shot d’Ville with this dumb steampunk gun, right in his smug face, and Ashes picked up his body and carried him away while he healed. I could hear him cackling on the horizon. I can still hear him. I’ll always hear him. I might’ve started laughing too.

Alex bled out so slowly, but everything I tried, everything I’d learned at uni, came to nothing. Their Archivist’d known, I realized later. They’d all known that I couldn’t do anything. I hadn’t even scratched any of them as Tim and Ashes blew our sanctuary to bits. In fact, they’d hurt each other and themselves worse than I’d managed. Than I ever could’ve managed

I stayed there in the wreckage for so long. At some point, I must’ve started hallucinating, but I don’t know... was that from isolation? From lack of sleep? Or was it real? If I’d gotten here... at least some of it had to have been...

She was real, though, because I found this place. Unless this is a hallucination too. Unless I’m in a new nightmare, tracing words in the air with an invisible pencil. But if that’s true... then nothing’s true. None of this matters. But I’ve got to finish the story, and so she was real.

I never caught her name. She said I didn’t need to know it, that I didn’t matter enough for me to know it, and I might’ve fought her on that when I was a youthful idealist, when the moon was still in the sky, but I was so tired and hungry. I’d lost everyone I’d ever cared about, to death or to something worse. I didn’t matter. Not to her. Not to anyone. The most she said about herself was that she was a doctor.

She was beautiful. She dressed like a gallant prince from a story, all bundled up in a black and gold cloak, and she looked the part too, with her shockingly intense dark crimson locks tied back in a tight ponytail and sharp features. I wanted her to pay attention to me forever. The only part that didn’t fit was the messy wound over her eye, not quite healed over but not quite scarred. I don’t think it was blood coming out of the wound, only because of how it didn’t smudge or change on her face as she moved. But the mark didn’t take away from her beauty or her nobility. I think she might’ve carried a rapier at her waist, but I was so focused on her face that I can’t say for certain.

She felt cold when I focused on her mouth. I forgot the heat in my face, forgot her comforting words, and felt only the chill of the night, the certainty that if I had something she wanted, she would take it and feel no regret. But I didn’t, and so she could be my prince. She was so proud of that. She told me about you, and I am here.

I’m not sure how I’m here. I didn’t know which way was up, let alone which way was London, but I’m here. I have more tales to be told, I promise you, and I’m tired of hungering. Let me be full.

Statement ends.

Well. I see why Jon dismissed the first statement he found about the Mechanisms. It’s safe to assume the figure at the end is Doctor Carmilla. She’s showed up in a number of Section 31 files. I sorted most of them with the other vampires, though I’m beginning to think that might be a mistake. There are a number of differences between them, not the least of which being her capacity for complex verbal communication.

I’m inclined to doubt some sort of future moon war that resembles World War I but ends with an apocalyptic event that destroys civilization to some great extent will occur in three thousand years time. It seems more likely that the Mechanisms are traveling across parallel universes. This event must’ve taken place in their past, since it appears that Melanie wasn’t with them. I can’t imagine Melanie treating anyone in the manner described, to the point that Jonny d’Ville would say she belonged to his family, but I suppose trauma and immortality changes a person.

Apparently I sound similar to this Ashes. A cosmic mystery. I don’t believe I have any long lost siblings like Jonny, and they haven’t shown up to give their own statement in the past week as far as I can tell, so I suppose I’ll have to wait till Axe Tim finds another one of these. I’ll do some follow ups of my own with Georgie.


	6. MECH 06 - Sanguine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement of "Axe" Timothy Stoker, on the murder of… of my brother, Danny, four years ago. February 17th, 2019.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Vampirism, loss of a loved one, graphic depictions of violence, broken bones.

It’s real goddamn funny, isn’t it? Tim _Stoker_ thinks his brother got eaten by a vampire. I’m a riot.

For a while there, I thought I was crazy too. That I’d exaggerated it in my memory, added supernatural bits because I was traumatized. Especially after Trevor Herbert’s statement. I was skeptical of that one to you, because if that was true, and it didn’t match up with my experience at all... well, I must’ve been crazy. And maybe part of that was a relief. It was too fitting, too ironic an end for a Stoker. I kept an eye out for vampires though, even as I was starting to come to terms with the fact that maybe nothing truly supernatural had happened. That I wouldn’t be able to track her down and make her pay for what she did to my brother. 

Then Melanie’s statement. I‘d always liked Melanie. We had common ground in wanting to get the hell out of here when we realized what it was and were both fond of Sasha. She was good company for commiserating about what happened to her. Now I’m starting to wonder if Sasha got off easily. She never learned the full truth about this place, though she had her suspicions. She was sharp and always had her thoughts. I didn’t tell her about Danny, but she knew there was more to my interest in vampires than the last name. She didn’t mock me. I figured she had her own skeletons in her closet. You don’t go to The Magnus Archives because you had a good time with the supernatural. 

Melanie’s statement didn’t focus too much on what Doc Carmilla looked like, but I knew right away it was the same monster. I felt it resonate in my bones like you wouldn’t know. All the rage that’s been building in me this entire time has a target now. She’d taken my brother from me, and now she was hurting my friend, a friend I’d thought was dead. She was right not to invite me to her show. I’d have ripped those bastards to shreds with my bare hands. She says she cares about them, but I’ve read the statements. I know what they’re like. It’s not just Doc Carmilla. They’re all monsters. 

Jonny d’Ville is as close to a cannibal that something that’s not human can get, assuming he hasn’t eaten his precious crew too, and I don’t doubt he has. I checked the timelines, matched suspicious police reports against dates where they gave statements or when statements suggested they were present. Most of them were Section 31, of course, but I got Basira to look through my files, and she says the patterns are there too. Wanna know the worst part? Almost a dozen of the statements I found describe Melanie, in one form or another. None, excluding the recent ones, from any time she could possibly be alive. Some of these look like they’re not even from our Earth, and those ones are even more explicit about how the Mechanisms, Melanie included, ruined their lives. 

Of course, Doc Carmilla’s the worst of the lot, but for a reason I wasn’t expecting. See, she happens to fancy herself a good person. One who’s made a helluva lot of mistakes, she admits, but fundamentally a good person. I don’t have a statement from her on file, but a type like her, I’m sure it’s out there. She’s apparently got quite the ego. Well, it’s all bullshit.

The thing you’ve got to know about my brother Danny is that he was a good person. A genuinely good person. I don’t just mean he was nice, though he sure was. Most people who met him liked him. He had this way of making you feel heard. Whatever you were talking about, there was a good chance he’d be able to come up with half a dozen insightful questions that keep you talking, no matter who you were or what you were talking about. You always came away with the impression he cared, even if you ended up passionately disagreeing about the particular topic. 

A lot of the people he got closest to were homeless. He could get along with anyone, like I said, and he’d always give a little something to whoever we’d pass by. Danny made a point of getting to know the people in whatever neighborhood he was living with. After he died, a lot of his friends came up to me to ask what happened to him, since he used to come by at least once a week to check in on them. 

It wasn’t anything exploitative. He wanted to know what their lives were like, as more than something to pity or have distaste for, and he’d often tell me the most fascinating stories. I’d listen, only half-paying attention but always impressed with the range of experiences he could find. I wasn’t jealous of him as much as I was proud. He was the best little brother, and I was grateful that other people could see it like I could. 

He knew most of the different types of homeless people. He’d described them to me, talked about how I could tell and he’d give so many comparisons to actual people he knew against examples in books he’d read, but it mostly went over my head. I’m not saying that he was obsessed with homelessness or anything, he really wasn’t. But he got interested in it once and a lot of the habits and relationships he formed just stuck. So he could tell there was something different about the Doc right away.  
I’d gone up to see him at Edinburgh, during the Fringe. He’d started a band — The Green Flynns — a half a year before this, and this was going to be their first big gig. He played the drums. I couldn’t tell you if he was any good or not— I’ve wasn’t really a huge music person before this— but I’m sure he was because he was good at everything. They weren’t a huge deal, they only had a couple of small gigs before this, but I was their number one fan already. They’d just recorded their first album, and I’d been listening to it on loop. 

He stayed in the same hotel room as the rest of the band, and it was pretty cramped, so he’d spend the time he wasn’t either practicing or playing in my room, catching me up with what he’d been doing. I’d listen to him go for hours, and then he’d listen to me. It wasn’t exactly taking turns, since we’d end up overlapping each other’s speech and our conversations could go from one point to another before careening wildly off track without warning, but we both seemed to have our turns. It was always easy with him. When everyone else seemed like a puzzle I didn’t have the pieces for, he was just… there. 

It was the second to last day when it happened. It was one of the handful of days he didn’t have a show planned, so we could go see what else was going on. Neither of us had been to Edinburgh before, and it really was a beautiful city. He hadn’t been into photography for a couple of years, but he remembered enough to moan about leaving his camera at home. We got dinner at a pub that had some forgettable musicians playing in the background. I could tell Danny was trying to listen, but really, they just weren’t that good. I don’t remember if either of us had anything to drink. I know I wasn’t blackout drunk, and I’m reasonably certain I’d retained most of my sense, but we might very well had been tipsy by the time we were ready to head back home. The food was decent, similarly unmemorable, and we decided to head back to the hotel instead of seeing the comedy show we’d planned. Well, I suggested it, and he reluctantly agreed. I could tell the busy schedule was getting to him. There were bags under his eyes, and he was shakier than usual. 

Edinburgh is an old city. It was well lit, but there were plenty of old side streets that took you away from the crows, even in the height of Fringe season. I’d wanted to get away from the hubbub, and Danny’d wanted to get a look at the city itself, so we took the scenic route back, even though it meant the trip was much longer. 

It was pretty dark out, despite the lamps everywhere, and I couldn’t keep from feeling slightly nervous. I’m sure he felt it too, but neither of us let on to the other. We joked and laughed louder than ever, making sure everyone in a half mile radius thought we were insufferable, I’m sure, and stayed close. As we went further away from the crowds, I’d started to feel a strange chill. Not the familiar bite of Scottish weather, but something else. I couldn’t put my finger on it. 

I’m not sure how far away from the pub we were when we encountered her. Must’ve been a good mile at least. Danny was always the better athlete, but I’ve spent a decent amount of time hiking. We weren’t really tired yet, just feeling the edge of the hectic month’s exhaustion. 

She sat by the side of the road, and like I said, we thought she was a tramp at first. She had this sort of frazzled look to her that I recognized. Her hair looked like it hadn’t been brushed in days, and there was a nasty cut over one of her eyes that looked only half healed and like it might start bleeding at any time. I wasn’t sure if she was awake or not, since her not-damaged eye was closed. She had on what I assumed to be a blanket, but upon further examination, revealed itself to be a cloak of some sort. She held the stringed instrument in her hand like it was a life saver, and she was drowning. She was shaking like a leaf, and her face was pale, almost inhumanely so. If you’d asked me, I would’ve guessed she was somewhere in her mid to late twenties. 

If I was alone, I might’ve tossed her a coin or just crossed the road to ignore her. I never really know what to say, and something about the night had already set me on edge, so I wasn’t exactly up for talking to strangers. But Danny was there, and he wanted to say hi. Check if she was okay. She looked like she might’ve been going through withdrawal, and he knew people who could help her through it without judging. 

I’d had a couple of problems with nicotine in college, and he’d been the one to help me break that habit, so I knew what it was like, and I was cool with it in the hypothetical. Still, I’d felt the need to tell him to be careful. He rattled some statistics off about homeless people being more likely to be the victims of crimes than perpetrators, but I could tell he was unsettled by her too. 

He stepped closer and said hello while they were still a couple of meters apart from each other. I followed but waited at more of a distance, standing behind Danny awkwardly with my hands in the pocket of my hoodie. She looked up and opened the functional eye. She looked from Danny to me to Danny again, and there was something strangely conflicted in it. I wasn’t sure whether to feel comfortable around her or unsettled. Neither reaction seemed to make much sense for the situation, so I pushed them both down. 

She pulled her cloak up and slid the stringed instrument into some sort of over the shoulder belt that made it look like a broadsword. It reminded me of a ukulele, but the tuning mechanism looked vaguely off. There were gears all over it making it looked like something right out of a steampunk story, but they were so small I’d assumed they must’ve been purely decorative. Without her hands on that, she just clenched her fists, and I swore I heard the sound of bones breaking. She asked Danny what he wanted, in a tone of voice that suggested she was used to being obeyed. Reminds me a bit of Elias, now that I’m thinking about it. Not quite as stuffy, but just as authoritative and unsettling threatening, even before she actually did anything. Danny was clearly unbalanced by the harsh tone, but he didn’t let it stop him. He said he just wanted to know if she was okay, if she needed anything, and she said she did. He introduced himself as Danny Stoker and me as his brother. 

I did not like the smile that crept across her face as he talked, especially at the last name, and I’d stepped up, putting one hand on his shoulder, about to say we should go, but he turned to look at me and shook his head. I backed off, uncomfortable, but I kept an eye on the end of the alleyway, just in case. I didn’t know what I thought she would do, but that coldness making a home in my core wasn’t particularly reassuring. Closer to her, I thought I could pick up the smell of blood and old meat. It made sense, with the half healed wound on her face. At least, that’s what I told myself. 

She smiled with too many teeth. It wasn’t just the two stereotypical vampire teeth either. They were all sharpened to a point, and they barely seemed to fit her mouth, but her tongue was normal. I was caught like a deer in the headlights when she turned her gaze on me, all while my knees went weak beneath me anyway, about to collapse at any moment. I should’ve grabbed Danny and ran. At least, that’s what I’d believed for a long time. Now, I’m not so sure that running would’ve saved him. It might’ve just annoyed her. Or, possibly worse, thrilled her. Made us like her Mechanisms. 

Danny crouched down to meet her height, and she examined him, somehow with both a detached coldness and an unsettlingly close to the surface boiling hunger that didn’t make any sense. He didn’t notice it, somehow, or was much better at hiding his feelings than I’d given him credit for. She reached out for his wrist as opposed to the hand he offered, and her grip was tight. Painfully. Not the the point that he screamed, but I knew how my brother’s face clenched up when he was trying not to let on that he was hurt. He’d twisted his ankle once when we were playing as kids, and it was the same expression. She pulled herself up using him for leverage, and he grabbed at her hand as a reflex, not managing to fully mute the sound of pain.

“Hush,” she ordered, and she didn’t let go once she was off the ground or stand all the way up. All her attention was on him, and he glanced to me, fear no longer disguised on his face. I couldn’t move. I wanted to scream, but I had the distinct impression nobody could’ve heard me if I did, and even if I had, that anyone who would’ve come would’ve just gotten hurt. I can’t remember blinking throughout the entire thing, watching powerlessly without understanding a thing. “You said you’d help.” 

He nodded, and I noticed tears in his eyes. My own vision stayed perfectly clear. She put her other hand on top of his and pealed his fingers off, one by one. My vision had adjusted to the dark well enough that I could make out the red of her hair, and it made me think of dried blood. I couldn’t breathe. All the screams and sobs were choked up in my throat. But he still could, when she increased the pressure. The sound of his desperate scream was almost entirely swallowed by the dark, or maybe that was just the feeling that my head was underwater. The grip tight enough to bruise, I realized, was her attempt to be gentle. 

She crushed his wrist. There aren’t any other words for it. The bone wasn’t broken at one near point; she’d shattered it to bits. Her eye was wide, drinking every inch of his expression in, except for the rare moment where she flickered her gaze over to me. Like she was daring me to run or challenge her. She wanted me to, maybe. There was something about the way she phrased things, the order in which she’d taken her actions, that implied she actually cared what we did. That she’d taken Danny’s offer to help as permission to do... something and his visible fear as insult demanding retribution. 

He fell backwards, unable to whip his hand back to catch himself, so he landed unequally, and she was already on top of him, one hand still on his wrist and the other at his throat, tilting his chin up with just a pointer finger. He shrieked in pain, his voice higher and sharper than I’d ever heard it. Danny wasn’t the most careful person ever, and he’d gotten hurt plenty of times, but never like that. 

"I can do this the nice way or the fun way. Which is it going to be, Danny?”

She said his name. She’d listened. She made it sound like there was some sort of choice involved in the matter, like this was anything other than an attack. She was so certain in her conviction, her voice so measured like this was a normal summer night. Like the options were what she wanted to get for dinner, though I guess in her case, it was. I get nauseated just fucking thinking about it. 

His response was barely audible, a weak groan and mumbled, “no,” that was a sharp contrast to the bloody shriek almost moments ago. I still couldn’t move. The scent of blood was so much stronger, overpowering, and I could see bits of my brother’s bone. His hand laid splayed at such a wrong angle. The fight or fight reflex had flipped, and I’d landed on freeze. Some of the blood I was tasting was mine, I realized, as I’d bitten through my lip. I hadn’t felt the pain. 

“The fun way, then,” she said, and she adjusted her grip, pushing her knee into his chest to pin him and releasing his wrist. Not that she needed to. Danny was strong, from a couple of months on various sports teams, and determined as hell, but there was clearly nothing he could do. I couldn’t help but notice cracks in the pavement from where she’d been sitting. He screamed again, and it brought me to my knees for months, remembering that sound, and how it didn’t seem to stop. He kicked out, but she snuck a leg under his knee and twisted it at an angle sharp enough that I heard something crack. He didn’t stop resisting, and he tried so hard to look at me, something desperate in his eyes, but she grabbed his recently grown out hair and dragged his head this way and that, exposing his neck.

As strange as it sounds, it wasn’t until afterwards that I realized she had to have been a vampire, even once she’d dug her fangs into his neck, Danny still awake and screaming for so much longer than should’ve been possible considering the amount of blood lost. Didn’t occur to me at all, until at least three weeks later, in the middle of the night when I was halfway to unconsciousness. 

I don’t know what she meant by the “nice” option, though I’m sure it wasn’t letting both of us go. Maybe she meant she’d‘ve made it quick, because what she actually did was agonizingly slow. She didn’t latch on at one point, like all the movie vampires do. She tore out chunks of flesh and ran that too-human against the messy wounds they left behind. His blood was all over her mouth, her face, and He stopped being able to scream at some point, but that wasn’t when he died. He was still fighting powerlessly against her iron grip, even as his body grew paler and paler. I was certain I was next.

I wasn’t. At some point, which could’ve been any number of hours later, she stood up, dropping Danny’s head against the ground. There was a sickening thud, and I cringed wanting to bring my hands behind my head to shield it in sympathy. I didn’t need to worry about head trauma. He was already dead. She looked me over, close enough that I could feel her cold clammy breath on my skin, as well as the heat of my brother’s fresh blood. I couldn’t speak. 

“Tim, right?” she asked, her voice seemingly unaffected by the brutality. I nodded, my first movement since we got to the alleyway. She laughed and wiped some of the slick blood off her face with two fingers, which she proceeded to lick like a little kid with frosting. It was a calm, more an amused chuckle than a hysterical cackle. “Thanks. I needed that. Things could’ve gotten messy if I’d waited much longer.” 

I didn’t have anything to say to that. I didn’t have anything to say for a long time. She walked by me, cape caught in the Edinburgh night wind, and disappeared. I just stood there for so long. The police came eventually, but I didn’t have answers to any of their questions. When I finally found my voice again, I only had more questions. Found my way to The Magnus Archives, thought I could look through the cases for answers, and I found some, but they only raised more questions. I don’t know why she let me live, but she’s going to regret it. Melanie, Jonny, and Nastya all said she couldn’t be killed by conventional methods, but I don’t need to kill her. 

Shooting her into space at the very least inconvenienced her for a while, pissed her off, so that’s a start. Jonny thought there was a possibility she could find these statements, so there’s no way in hell I’ll write the full details, but rest be assured, I’ve got a plan. If I can’t kill her, I can make her hurt and rue the day she laid her eye on the Stoker family. Make her pay for slaughtering my brother in front of me and having the audacity to thank me for it. 

Melanie is as good as dead. We grieved for her; we moved the fuck on. The faster you guys accept that, the better off we’ll be. At the very least, she’s not one of us. She’s Doc Carmilla’s little pet project, and she’s just as bad as her sire. As far as I’m concerned, Danny was lucky she didn’t take a liking to him. At least he died as a decent human being.

So now you know why I give a shit, Basira. Jon. Both of you are insufferable about this, holy fuck. I hope you're happy. On the rest of what's going on, I don't care. Daisy's back? Fucking fantastic. Martin's still missing, Peter Lukas freaking out about potential interference for whatever his dumb plan is, Elias smug asshat as always, _whatever_. I don't care. She could come back at any time, and when she's back, I'm going to make her fucking pay. 

Go to hell.


	7. MECH 07 - Mutually Assured Destruction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Statement given by Archival Assistant Daisy Tonner, regarding her past experiences with Doctor Carmilla and the Mechanisms. February 24, 2019.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Heavily implied sexual content, explicit depictions of Daisy-typical police brutality, beatings, broken bones, eye gore, alcohol consumption, gun violence, referenced stalking, implied off-screen dubious content.

The Mechanisms, huh? Things sure have changed around here. Last time, it was clowns. Now, it's still clowns, but they're in space and harder to kill and their vampire mom is here too. 

It’s funny. I’d almost forgotten the first time I met them wasn’t on the streets or in some big incident that made the higher works sweat bullets trying to cover up. I wasn’t even in uniform; I was at a bar. This was about a year into being Section’d. Basira and I were partners at work, but just at work, just as a matter of formality. So I was alone, sipping whiskey, and listening to them play in the background.

Bars are good places to hunt monsters. Not always the inhumane type either. Plenty of normal sleeze bags hanging around. I could recognize the look in their eyes better than I could spot the signs of a more inhumane type by then, seen it on the Underground or on the street. Looking for someone to prey on, not because they liked the nitty gritty of what hurting someone entailed but because it made them feel powerful just for a little bit. I told myself I was better than that, that I was showing them a taste of their own medicine when I’d catch their gaze long enough to drag them out behind the bar and leave them battered and bloodied, but now I’m sure I was wrong a enough of the time that it wasn’t worth it. Alcohol and bloodlust pounding in my skull didn’t make for a very accurate combination.

The Mechanisms were just a uni band with a gimmick, I’d figured. They smelled off but not like anything I could put my finger on. Put me in a rotten mood. I’m not even sure I realized it was them stinking up the joint, not for a good while. They played loud and violent tunes, my type of crew, and I liked how their rhythm was in lockstep with the sound of blood. I hear it now, and it’s hard not to fall into it. I won’t, though, not again. I don’t want to be that me. 

Crowded places are hard, especially when music like that’s playing. There’s always an edge of violence to them that could be directed by a monster among them, stirring up the hunger for guts, or could be human nature. Once I had a target, the whole of London packed into a single room couldn’t stop me from tracking them down, but it was the finding that was the hard part and usually the fun part. 

This crowd was off with that violent edge, but it was more than that. My senses were getting mixed up, like there was someone that tasted of looking up at the Milky Way in awe in the room, and I could hear the gentle din of cold romance. Not in an overwhelming way, like with the guy I killed when I first met Jon, or in an obsessive way, like with the bug people. It was almost soothing, completely atonal with their songs, so no wonder I didn’t point my finger their way 

The one that finally tipped me off wasn’t on stage, though. Funny enough, I didn’t make the connection between her and the band’s weirdness till the third or fourth time I crossed their paths and she was in the vicinity. I might’ve been thrown off by the senses, but I could see the way she was looking at the person next to me, like she was sizing up her next meal, and I knew there was something off with her. As she approached, I caught her attention instead, and it didn’t seem to sway her much. 

I’ve never been much of a flirt, though that doesn’t mean I struggled when I went looking for relationships. That’s not a brag, i haven’t gone looking since Basira and I fell into our arrangement, just a fact. As much as I acted as judge, jury, and executioner for others doing the same, I looked at sexual encounters the same as I did hunts, and I was very good at hunts. 

Talking to Carmilla was less like tracking down prey as it was fighting over territory with another predator. Can’t tell you too much about the discussion, pretty sure it was all pretense and both of us knew it. I know I asked her about the teeth, pointed as they were, and she’d asked me about mine. I said it was none of her business, mostly because I was startled someone had the audacity to mention how, well, monstrous my appearance had gotten. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her dead or just plain old fancied her, and I figured I’d decide on the way to her place. She reminded me a bit of Basira, though that might’ve been Ashes singing in the background. Quick on the draw and one helluva a voice. 

I didn’t say much. She had enough words for the both of us. Nice enough but with an edge. I was vulnerable. Told me she was the band’s mom, that she’d been playing with them earlier, and I said she didn’t look old enough for that. She laughed like I’d said something very funny indeed, which pissed me right off, and I almost tried to kill her right there. She clarified they were adopted, with a little grin. 

That’s when she kissed me, or maybe I kissed her. I heard the blood louder than I ever had, and I’m sure she could hear it too. 

Her kisses were good, but you wouldn’t get why. I’m not sure why now. It should’ve been repulsive, lips cold as a corpse and breath tasting faintly of a fresh kill with the same harsh coppery undertone that entailed, and it’s not like I’d ever started tearing people up to eat them, not at my most monstrous. But it was good when it was her. Neither of us closed our eyes like they do in the movies or whatever, we were too busy watching each other. You know that old story about the prisoners? One betrays, they get off the hook, the other is screwed, both trust, they’re both free to go, both betray, they’re both screwed? That was us. 

Carmilla came back to my place after the frontman of her band yelled at us to get a room. We held hands while we walked back, but it wasn’t the cutesy middle school shit you might be imagining. The two of us were strangling each other with our fingers, a feeling that was somehow reassuring then. Can’t imagine that now, not with everything, but... I used to like the pressure, couldn’t sleep without about six different blankets or someone on top of me. When we were outside, away from the violence of the crowd, I could track the scent much more accurately. She wasn’t all of it, of course, a good chunk was those kids of hers, the Mechanisms, but she was the lion’s share of the uncanny sense, and I wanted to pin her down. 

I woke up alone. Shouldn’t have been possible. I’ve always been a light sleeper, especially when people like Carmilla were about, but she was gone like she’d never been there in the first place. All that was left was a cold place in my sheets and on my chest where she’d laid her head the night before, and her strangely alluring carrion taste on my lips. I screamed like I hadn’t screamed in a long time, certain that I’d lost my chance to kill her. Over the night, I’d convinced myself I was going to kill her in the morning before she could kill me— I recognized the look in her eyes, and I knew she was milling it over— but now she was gone, I was sure I’d never see her again. Sure I’d never give the chance to put her down like the barely controlled rabid I knew she was or figure out what her and that damned band was up to. 

Not sure if it was good luck or shit luck that I picked up the chase a couple months later. I was walking down a street in Oxford, taking the long route home, when I heard some familiar music coming out of a small bar. Not the same place, I don’t even remember what the first one was called, but similar. Just enough of an audience to terrorize, not enough that they’d really be believed. I couldn’t place the songs, since I hadn’t exactly been paying attention to the _music_ the first time, but the energy set something in my gut off. Made me stop 

Carmilla wasn’t there but rest of the band was. Might’ve had a few new members. I don’t think Melanie was there, but neither was the thing with the same voice as that murderous clown mannequin this time or the robot that didn’t play the drums. This time, I didn’t get distracted with a pretty face. I was planning to wait till the finished up the set, ambush one of them after, cuz I didn’t want to create a panic, but the pretty boy with the goggles, pulled out a gun and shot someone in the audience halfway through. Not sure if it was lethal or not but considering the stories their songs told, I could assume they weren’t opposed to a bit of lethal force. So I shot back. 

Can’t really tell you what happened next. It’s all a bit of a blur. Not sure how I survived, honestly. I’m sure a normal human wouldn’t have lasted like I did, and the clearest image I’ve got of that night is of a ruined bar, tables turned on their sides or broken. Plenty of bystanders were torn to pieces with the amount of bullets flying, and I was covered in blood, mine and strangers and theirs. Most of the crowd survived and plenty still liked the music for some absurd reason, from what I heard later, but none of them got off free. Most were injured in some way, either shot by spare bullets or trampled in the crowd. Still a couple of missing reports, I think I saw them carry off a couple of bystanders. 

My clothes were shredded from bullet wounds I’d dismissed as grazes, though I’m pretty sure a couple of those holes were over my heart and head. They didn’t seem particularly plussed one way or the other, enjoying the violence. I was never one for big brawls, and I was outnumbered. Despite myself, I think I was scared. Either that or excited, it was hard to tell the difference. My gun ran out of bullets rather quickly, and I'd apparently resorted to using myself as a weapon. The blood under my nails and on Ashes’s face suggested I’d taken to clawing at them with my fingers. My voice was raw, must've been screaming. Probably something like, "you aren't her," cuz the similarity was so goddamn uncanny.

Most of them were busy regenerating as I came to, especially Ashes who’d gotten caught in the face with their own Molotov. I have no idea how they made it so quickly, considering how I’d started the fight off by taking them down. They seemed the wiliest, and I’m not just saying that cuz they sound like Basira. The science-y one with wings and the worse archivist were standing, but they’d apparently gotten bored of the fight because they were just chatting like none of this mattered. It made so angry, you know? This mattered to me-- people were dead, innocent people-- and they were laughing? Maybe I was a killer, but I never pretended I didn't give a shit. At least, that's what I thought. 

I attacked them, with fresh fury. The past couple of hours of fighting apparently hadn’t taught me anything, because her wings caught the blow, and she sent some sort of needle my way that left me dazed for long enough for the rest to get back up again and head out. The frontman with the shit eyeliner, who’s… your long lost twin brother? Yeah, I didn’t process that bit of the story. He was laughing his ass off the whole time, even before his throat healed up. The sound was unsettling and pissed me right off, but the trail was cold, and even if their bullets hadn’t killed me, they’d hurt like hell. 

So I slunk back home, tail between my legs, and called in sick. I’m sure I’d overcompensated the next couple of hunts, faster to judge who was and wasn’t a monster, crueler than I wanted to be. Not that I was ever nice or particularly caring, but those weeks before I caught wind of some clown bullshit that kept my attention for a good while were some of the worst. 

It was a pretty big gap between those encounters and the next one, maybe a couple of months, and this time, it was just Carmilla. She looked different, and I’m not just saying that cuz her hair was blue now. She looked shaken, kinda like I was right after the coffin, except she still smelled like old blood. Maybe even older now. The side of her face was covered by an eye patch the first time we’d met, one that she didn’t take off with the rest of her fancy clothes, but now I could see there was an ugly wound there, one that didn’t look like it’d healed a day since she’d got it, and I remembered faintly reaching up to pull the patch off before she’d stopped me with a firm grip, telling me, “this is not a night for ugly things.” The wound wasn’t septic; it was too recent for that. The blood there was fresh, but it wasn’t hers. Or, it was hers, but it wasn’t _this_ hers, if that made any sense. I knew if I tried to wipe it away, I’d only succeed in dirtying my hands. 

There was dirt in her hair, and I think she might’ve been crying. It wasn’t anywhere near a tavern or bar or any sort of place for small, mysterious musicians to sing or play at, at least not that I recognized, and she didn’t seem to have any instruments with her. She was wearing a tattered black hoodie, I took advantage of that, followed her for a good couple of miles. 

She didn’t let on that she knew I was there, didn’t even wipe away her tears or clean up her hair. Her scent was the same, maybe even stronger than before and easier to follow. None of the Mechanisms were around, I was sure of it. I’m still pretty positive on that front, after listening to the statements you recorded and a couple of the Gertrude ones that seemed relevant. I’m not sure if she was deliberately luring me from the start or if she changed direction after she spotted me, which is impressive to say the least. I was at the height of my hunt fervor. I was sure I’d kill her, no matter what’d happened with the Mechanisms. I’d looked her up in the files, I knew what vampires were like, even though she didn’t match most of the reports. 

I confronted her in an alleyway. My shadow loomed behind me, long and dark, and she smiled at me, like I was an old friend rather than a hook up we’d only regretted because we hadn’t killed each other by the end of it. I attacked her, and she didn’t fight back. Not because she couldn’t or that I’d at all had the advantage, I was sure she could’ve turned the tables on me at any time if she’d wanted to. She didn’t bleed at all, even when I smashed her skull into the wall hard enough to leave a visible dent. 

She laughed at my blows and that just infuriated me further. Her laugh wasn’t anything like your brother’s, Jon, outside of the hysterical edge. It was hard to tell if she was crying or not, after a while. I don’t know how long we were there like that, me kicking her face in and her face knitting back in place, smile untouchable even as I knocked out her jagged teeth again and again, with barely any sign of resistance, but it must’ve been hours. The sun was high when I’d spotted her, just starting to sink, but when I’d stopped to take a breath, it was almost night. 

I realized I was exhausted, tired to my bone like I hadn’t been since I’d given myself over to the chase. I was covered in so many little bits of her, bone and brain and chunks of teeth, but not blood. It was quiet, outside of a song she’d started humming. She was unsettlingly tranquil, considering the beating I’d delivered her and how much of a wreck she’d seemed. The chunks of earth in her hair were mostly displaced by the violence, but they weren’t all gone. Now her face was covered with dust. 

She looked beautiful, and I started to wonder why I’d attacked her in the first place. I knew she was a monster with a certainty I hadn’t had before since my second encounter with the Mechanisms. I hesitated, looked at my fists, and I felt so wrong. There was an absence in my chest where my connection to the Hunt had been, and I was so weak without it. I don’t know what she did, but the silence didn’t last long enough for me to think through my actions, like with the coffin. It lasted long enough for her to wrap her hand around my wrist and drag me to the ground in my stunned horror. 

If only it’d lasted. She would’ve killed me, I’m sure, if the full force hadn’t come rushing back in time to heal my wounds, but I’d have been me. There’s a lot of innocent people and not half bad monsters like you, Jon, who’d be alive right now if she’d done that. I don’t want to be dead, but I don’t want to be that either. 

She moved fast. I could barely make out anything without the Hunt sharpening my vision, without being able to taste her sweet rot, but she was fast even for people not suddenly cut off from their source of life, though obviously I didn’t really process that was what’d happened until later. All I knew was that one moment, I was in control, the next, I was exhausted, and then I was against the ground, her straddling my chest and pulling my ponytail up so she could smash my head into the ground. Unlike her, I could bleed and bleed I did. 

I remembered how long the bruises from her Mechanisms lasted, and I screamed, even as the Hunt came rushing back. I surged up, trying to push her off with all the eldritch strength I could muster, and I managed to throw her off for a moment, but that just seemed to make her angrier. I’m pretty sure she was mumbling something abut not being able to believe she slept with a damn cop, which would’ve been funny except for the part where I wasn’t sure the angle she was pushing against my back wouldn’t leave me paralyzed. 

I clawed at her, tried to dig my nails into her from my awkward position beneath her weight, and I would’ve bit her if my face wasn’t pointed at the ground, nose broken in several different places. The humiliating part was that she wasn’t using her full strength. She was surprised at my initial heft, but she adjusted her grip, and I couldn’t budge her. She’s not like us. SHe’s not an Avatar or a mindless beast; she’s something different. 

She was talking throughout it all, clearly irritated, but not angry. Not enraged. I was a mess of teeth, and I’d left a dent in the pavement, but she was pulling her punches. Still in control. I hated that composure of hers. I was angry and scared, terrified she would kill me and terrified she wouldn’t. I was the hunter, I’d tracked her and ambushed her, but it turned out she didn’t care. I’d cracked her fucking skull open, and she was mildly irritated. She’d beat me like this for a mild inconvenience. I wasn’t sure which pissed me off more. Either way, she was treating me like prey. 

She didn’t eat me like she did Axe Tim’s brother, so I guess I’m lucky on that front. Well, not lucky, I suppose, since she did explicitly say something about how tasty I looked but she didn’t like to get into the habit of eating people she’d slept with. This was not the weirdest experience I’d ever had with an ex, if you can believe it, but it’s up there. 

I’m not sure how long she hit me. At least as long as I’d done it to her, but I’ve got to say that her standards of payback were warped as hell. She broke my legs and arms too. I healed quickly and didn’t get hurt as much when I was connected to the Hunt, but that was excessive. And they weren’t clean breaks. I still get pain. After she was done, she had the audacity to ruffle through my bags. She found my phone and called Basira. I don’t even know how she found out about us, I’d barely told her anything, and I deleted most of my messages to and from her after a while. 

She looked me with her one working eye head on, and I realized she’d kept my vision almost perfectly untouched. On purpose. Just so she could make me watch her dial up my _partner_ and have the nerve to act so concerned. I tried to scream at Basira, not any specific warning just that it wasn’t like Carmilla was saying, but she kicked me, and my head went swimming. By the time I’d recovered enough to know what was happening, Carmilla was gone. Again, no evidence she was ever there, outside of the injuries with a trace of cold to them. 

I took care of most of the cases involving the Mechanisms from then on. Nobody had a problem with it, not when I showed up all battered and broken months after trying to kill one of them. If Carmilla is one of them, I’m not sure the technicalities of their relationship. But… yeah. They kept popping up. Sometimes Carmilla was with them, sometimes she wasn’t. Never saw her with the teal hair again and never off her rhythm like that. She was always a little bit tired, but never that sort of bone deep exhausted. Never looking like she’d just gotten exhumed from her grave. She never acknowledged that encounter either, referring only to the first and flirting like nothing was wrong. I said I had a partner now, and she backed off, but the rest of our fights were less brutal. All of us should’ve been dead a dozen times over, but that almost became playful. 

Statement done. Whoo. 

The only evidence that bloody evening happened is Basira’s memories of finding me in a pool of blood (mine) and assorted organs and teeth (hers). My scars have faded, though they’re still here. Do you know what sort of scars a vampire beating you half to death leaves? Oh, sorry, you probably just had to Know that, didn’t you? Weird thought. I’m not really sure how all this works yet. 

On Melanie… I saw her a couple of times, but she tended to stay away from confrontations involving me for reasons the others teased her about. That’s why I was weird about her when we first met, I’d recognized her future self. Well, not the only reason. The hunt had me pretty bad. I wasn’t directly planning to kill her like I’d planned to kill you, but the possibility had passed through my mind. If she was still mortal… Well, it didn’t happen, and my more recent actions are a large part of what got my past self into that mess into the first place. I hate time travel. 

I know Axe Tim wants to fight her. He thinks he has a plan, something that involves Peter Lukas and Leitner for some reason, but I’m not sure that’s a good idea. If you could Know some weakness of hers, you would’ve and told us. Or Elias would’ve. I know Basira has been going to him for information, trying to fix the Mechanisms into her neat puzzle picture of the world, and he’s been consistently unhelpful. Not even in the vague bullshit way he was before, when he could clearly tell. I think he sincerely does not know much about them. Types like him, they wouldn’t admit to not knowing shit if they didn’t have a real good reason, and I’m not sure I like the reason Basira is giving him. 

Not that I of all people can complain. It’s ironic, me being concerned about her going too far. The two of us need to talk, don’t we? Jon, don’t be nosy on this one, I’m just talking out loud right now. Oh, and Martin too, if you’re listening to these. Axe Tim says he knows what you’re up to, or at least he thinks he does, but he’s not sharing, and I’m not resorting to my standard methods of persuasion. Axe Tim probably kill Jon if he tried the compel the answers out of him, but Jon’s nosy, and I’m pretty sure that if threats to his life didn’t stop him before, they won’t stop him now. Especially when someone he feels like he needs to protect’s involved. 

Basira… We need to talk in person. Not just about the vampires and cyborgs and the full story behind the time you found me mutilated in a dark alley, though obviously you have a few questions about that part. For the record: yes, she was… good in bed and even better at beating the shit out of me. Being an ancient and mysterious vampire will do that, apparently. No, I’m not sure what she’s a doctor in. She probably mentioned it at some point, either time I’d really heard her go off, but I wasn’t exactly listening. You’re the words one. 

Yeah. Okay, Jon. There you go. I’ll write down anything relevant that I remember later. But if the Eye seems to think this is enough, then I guess this is enough. 

Recording over.


	8. MECH 08 - Odontodactylus Scyllarus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martin Blackwood... Assistant to Peter Lukas, Head of the Magnus Institute, recording statement number 0172701, statement of, uh, Lyfrassir Edda, given January 27, 2017. Statement begins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Mechs typical violence taken seriously, dissociation, sanity slippage, eldritch bullshit.

I know how they play me. How it plays me. 

The Mechanisms. They write their songs about tragedies that they interfere with so recklessly, and they lie. No, they don’t lie, they exaggerate. Maybe that’s worse. If their stories were all lies, then I wouldn’t have seen that man wearing my face, repeating words I’d spoken all those years ago but wrong, twisted, out of context. I wouldn’t have seen Jonny d’Ville smiling and laughing for so long as he sung, with a maddened glee, how everything I’d ever known and loved turned to shit. 

I didn’t know about Jonny d’Ville and the rest of his crew when I’d first met the Mechanisms. Midgard only ever heard of four, and those four were more than enough. When they came to Midgard, they’d carved a bloody red path across our cities. 

This was right after contact between the planets was severed. With the then-inexplicable loss of the Asgardian government on the Bifrost, everyone was too wrapped up in the power struggle that followed to compare files, even on such strange criminals. Perhaps the others were on Hel, Valhalla, tearing those worlds apart. By the time Midgard was stable enough to ask for help, a couple decades later, we’d captured the Mechanisms, and nobody wanted to believe there could be more to them. Especially when we realized they weren’t aging. 

Doctor Baron Marius Von Raum. Ivy Alexandria. Melanie King. Raphaella la Cognizi. I remember their faces. They run freely through my mind, their smirks and sharp teeth on the eyes of everyone I focus on for more than a second. 

I blink, see the flash of a camera bulb, and the smile is replaced by a bored expression or a frown. They’re not smiling at me. They’re not making a mockery of me, joking along while they know my world is doomed. 

von Raum’s arm of metal held that violin high, curved to fit in like music was all that’d belonged there but I’d seem him with a gun and the violence that’d followed belonged just as tight. He dragged the bow across, fast and tight, as Alexandria would knowingly smile, the ticking in her skull not quite loud but raucous enough and at the right pitch to send needles through my mind. King kept the beat, foot tapping against the ground, leaving scars on the concrete, and la Cognizi would sing, oh, she would sing. 

She would sing with the voice of the angel she pretended to be, but I’d seen the pictures of those she’d taken away on those wings of hers, the needles filled with strange poisons buried inside those snow white feathers. 

They liked me, I think, and that’s the worst part. There’s something in my gut that twists, wants me to lose everything

This world is doomed too, I’m sure of it. It’s only a matter of time until everything I’ve found here turns to shit, and I’m as sure of it as I am that these hands are mine, these legs can carry me forward, but I’m not sure of anything at all. These hands turn to rainbow dust on the wind if I let my thoughts drift, and when I’m walking, I’m on the floor. 

I’m not sure how I got here. I know I looked for this place. I remember reading the passages on the website again and again. I can repeat them, if you want. I can repeat everything. But I don’t remember deciding to come. I don’t remember stepping out through the door, walking down the street, coming through the door. I’m sure I must’ve, at some point, but now all I can remember is standing outside that cell. 

They laughed, and they were human laughs. I expected it to be alien, somehow, the first time I’d met them. I’d expected them to be monsters like out of story tales, his fingers sharpened into nails, and her wings framing her body at an odd angle, spine contorted under the weight of them, but they were only human. And they are more human than the people they left behind. I survived, but I know what happened, even when I shouldn’t. I dream of my world. My family. My friends. People I’d pass on the way to work each day, people I’d barely started to recognize when their humanity was torn away from them by what lay beyond. Strangers. I dream, and I feel them watch me. 

They did not kill in their escape. They disappeared, leaving the guards confused and me with a rotten certainty that my world was doomed. The Mechanisms sing their songs, and I listen. I listen, because I cannot scream anymore, not that I deserve to scream. Not that I did anything. I never did anything. 

I was too late to warn anyone else, I know because I watch them all. Each night, I watch another gruesome fate play out, another body contorted past reason, another body buried beneath dirt that consumes them over and over again, and they do not all die. They live still, and Yog-Sothoth cares nothing for their pain. Those whose lives are ended by their torment are lucky. The others, their pain will not end for eternity. 

The Mechanisms escaped the end of my world, and they sing about it with their smiles wide, smiles that I’ll never escape as long as I live, and I don’t know for how long that’ll be. I watched the Black Box through to its end. I watched them sing. I watch still. I understand nothing. These Archives feel like home. If I let them take me, I’d never leave. I’d die here, but I’d never die.

I’m not sure why I resist still. Everything that was good about me is already dead, left behind and burned to pieces, twisted, distorted. All the crisp lines of reality, torn asunder. I speak too strangely for the people around here, my accent unusual, and my face doesn’t fit in. I stare too deeply, for too long, and every time someone gets the nerve to tell me, I wonder. Was I really lucky enough to escape or was I let go? Am I this world’s doom too? 

I don’t want to see it all again, but that is where I belong. I feel the call of a thousand Black Boxes in this room, innocent people’s suffering for me to drink in, and I know… I know I’m supposed to be part of this. There are eyes on me as I write this. Eyes that tick, made of gears, witnesses to destruction unimaginable to the sane. I could fit in there, just another cog. Replaceable. 

No.

I’m a toy, but I’m not your toy. I’ll listen to their songs until I’ve seen my whole world’s fate, and I’ll be consumed too. If not by the outer gods, then by grief or madness, and I’ll play my part. I’m the last one standing at their tragedy, and I’ll not cast myself in yours. I’ll watch my whole world burn, and when I’m done, when I’ve seen everyone I’ve ever known or could’ve known change and break and extinguish, Yog-Sothoth will take me too, take me into itself as a permanent record of all that used to be Midgard, used to be home. Maybe then I’ll end. 

No. I don’t think so. My clock is ticking and with every distortion, every dream, I grow further away from my humanity, but I won’t ever end. Not as long as there’s a story to be told, not as long as they sing, and he wears that mockery of my face, of my voice, with that laugh that’s not mine, will never be mine, is too human to be mine. 

I’m all that remains, but I’m a star ship, replaced piece by piece until there’s something entirely new in my place. But I’ll accept it. I’ll move on. There’s nothing here for me, not really. Everything is wrong, the colors don’t fit right into my eyes when I’m awake, and I don’t know how to begin to talk to people. I don’t eat much anymore— I’m not sure if I’ve been eating at all— and in some sickening way, I’m grateful, because at least it means I don’t have to try to look the grocer in the eye as I pay him with a currency from a dead world. 

I could force myself to fit into these eyes, could watch forever, and then, perhaps, the dreams would lift. I’d be safe from Yog-Sothoth, but only for another dread to crawl into my body, leave me dazed for hours and staring at new sorts of suffering, and at least this way, I’m connected to what I’ve left behind. They laugh at me and watch me with their too-human eyes, more human than mine, but I know them. A familiar terror, one I almost welcome as I tuck myself in at night, because at least the madness of the cosmic screams makes sense to me. 

Statement ends. 

Well. Lovecraft’s Outer Gods. Didn't expect that. 

Yog-Sothoth is probably another name for an entity. If there really are other occupied planets out there, it’d make sense for them to manifest there, and it does fit with Peter’s Extinction. A bit of the Eye, but that seems to be more on Mx. Edda’s end. I listened to a tape with The Bifrost Incident album on it, and it checks out. 

I’m just not sure what to do with this. Peter clearly believes his plan, whatever it is, will let him figure out how to keep the Extinction from getting this powerful here and deal with the Mechanisms for good. Hopefully he’s right. It’d be a lot easier if he told me what that is. 

If Elias really did let himself get locked up because he knew the Mechanisms had taken an interest in us… who knows what that means. 

Bye, spooky tape recorder.


	9. MECH 09 - Rocket Girl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Case 0112001 - Maki Yamazaki {22}. Statement received via mail January 20th, 2011. Committed to tape August 1, 2012.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: In depth descriptions of the effects of trauma, memory, uncertainty about reality, austerity measures, brief references to police brutality, human experimentation, Dr Carmilla typical abuse, and justifications of her actions. 
> 
> This isn't RPF, this is about the fictionalized defective clone Maki Yamazaki and not actual person Maki. Still, actual person Maki, if you're out there, I would feel kinda weird if you read this.

Dearest Gertrude, 

How accurate would you say your memories are? If you match up a memory of an event from your childhood to a recording of it, you’d probably be surprised at how distorted it is. Scores of people are falsely convicted every year on faulty eyewitness testimony. Memory isn’t a compartment where you can file a piece of data away and review it at your leisure. Memory is associative. If you’re eating an orange when you receive a call telling you that your mother has died, then you might never want to eat an orange again. If someone were to break your leg to prove a point while humming along to a certain song, you might end up turning off the radio whenever it comes on. 

My memories are primarily not my own. I’m a failed clone of Doctor Carmilla. I’m sure you have plenty of cases about her in your Archives, so I won’t bore you with the details. Besides, she’d probably kill me for oversharing. She’s existed on a scale so much bigger than you could comprehend, bigger than I can. I’ve existed for less than a decade. 

I don’t have all of her memories. I’m not sure how she works, biologically speaking, because the amount of data stored there doesn’t make any sense. Maybe true immortality adjusts your brain. She doesn’t forget stuff, though, not anymore than a normal person with an expanded scale. My mind is human through and through, albeit under a slightly different definition. I’ve got a fraction of her past, but less than one percent of billions is still enough to overwhelm me. If me is a word that means anything.

I’ll be sitting on a bench in a park, practicing my ukulele, and a woman will walk too close to me. I’ll smell her shampoo, and suddenly, I’m crying in public, and I feel so awkward because I’m not even sure why I’m sad. There’s something about that scent that reminded me of incalculable grief, like I’d just lost a loved one, and I’ve got no idea why. Something to do with hands, and I’m pretty sure the person the Doctor lost had black hair, but that’s frustratingly insufficient for something that left me dazed for hours.

And that’s a relatively simple example. Trauma is… complicated at the best of times. There’s an idea in a lot of fiction that it’s a matter of emotions, but it’s really not. The emotions of trauma are the symptom, not the disease. That’s part of the body, a physical reality that comes from living with fear. The brain overcorrects. Going back to the example from above, your brain might learn to dissociate whenever you hear the certain song because it signals pain. Even when you’re not in that situation anymore. Defense mechanisms can turn from helpful to harmful in the blink of an eye. 

I don’t know what my triggers are. She never tells me anything, assumes I knows it already and is disappointed when I don’t. She’s never out of traumatic situations, so she’s never stopped to consider how harmful those defenses can be, I suppose. Either way, I’ve found out most of them the hard way. At least, I think I know most of them. I’m sure I’ve got dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands, that I haven’t encountered yet, just because I spend most of my time on this planet. 

It’s not like it’s easy here. There are lots of everyday problems, not to mention the infestation of fear entities. I’ve had a couple of run ins with Conduits confusing me for the Doctor, and even when they find out the truth, they’re usually happier that it’s someone like me, because I can’t fight back anymore than any other human could. But it’s not the worst planet, and our face isn’t exactly plastered on Wanted posters all over the place. I’ve not been interrogated by the police for crimes I didn’t commit, and the Mechanisms don’t look for me. 

Even with that, I can barely get through the week without at least one incident, usually more. Like that song on the radio. Crying jags are the best of it. Sometimes I’m sure I’m being followed and get home at absurd hours of the night because I took a circuitous route to dodge pursuers, and then realize the next day, with little sleep, that I was probably just thinking that because the light in the clouds reminded me of a planet she’d had a… bad experience on. 

I’m not being cagey, I don’t know the details. All I know is that some evenings, when the sun is too red, I can’t stop feeling like everyone’s seeing through me. Literally— like there’s a physical hole in my chest that someone opened up to poke through my ribs and grab my heart. I hate bracelets, can’t tolerate wrist watches because of how they remind me of handcuffs, even though I’ve never been cuffed in my life. She never needed to cuff me, not like the Mechanisms. 

Jonathan would always fight, and even when his rage was directed at me, I was jealous. Well. Not always. That was only when it was just the three of us. Or presumably, him and the Doctor. She never paid much attention to when I was in or out of the room. Just another tool. Whenever the others were near, he changed completely. Always the first to volunteer. Not for me, never for me, but I never expected him to. I’m madd if 

I’ve been on this planet for three years, and I was with them for less than one, but that one was… eventful, to say the least. I see the Mechanisms and her every now and then, when they want to put on a show around London, and they’re always interesting. Bloody but interesting. 

I just sort of sit there at the bar and wait for them to finish up. Sometimes I go and hang out in the bathroom so I don’t get shot, but it’s usually not that bad. Usually. At least I inherited her desensitization to other people’s blood, because otherwise those gigs would be intolerable. I wait, and I watch, and I throw up later, disgusted with how unperturbed I am. 

I’m never going to be over her problems, as long as she stays in my life, but there’s literally nothing I can do about it. I can’t run. I can’t hide. If she can’t have me, she’ll make another one, and I don’t want to be responsible for that. As long as I’m convenient, there won’t be any other Makis. That’s what the ones before me wrote, and it wasn’t enough. We’re all failures. 

I’m painting a rather bleak picture of her, aren’t I? This place really does drag up all the darkest parts, doesn’t leave anything good. She really isn’t a bad person, not like the Mechanisms. She’s done a lot of good for worlds, and most of the worst fragments of memories come from times she tried to help. She’s lauded as a hero on some worlds, not responsible for bringing them back from the brink of extinction but a major helping force in allowing them to save themselves. She’s toppled tyrants the likes of which would make _your_ heart ache. And I know you’re kinda like me. 

You see glimpses, and you don’t understand the bigger picture. You’ve got all the trauma without any of the scars. It’s okay to bleed, Gertrude. It takes a toll, even when the wounds are indirect. The smell of cinnamon leaves me cowering on the ground for hours, and I don’t know why. I’m scared of heights and check every time I pick up something fragile because my body is used to being several degrees stronger than it is, but that’s not me. It won’t ever be, and I don’t want it to be. 

She’s not a bad person. She’s done a lot to save people, and she’s not scared to use violence when necessary. Sometimes, some of us are caught in the crossfire. I’m sure you can relate to that. I don’t remember all the Makis before me, because she doesn’t remember all of us. She’s stopped counting. Defense mechanisms. We’re only human, and she’s not. 

No matter how often I forget it. 

The Mechanisms are much worse, by far. At her worst, Doctor Carmilla doesn’t care about collateral damage, but they thrive in intentional damage. Pointless, ceaseless, hedonistic violence. Sometimes, once in a hundred years, they’ll do something good, but it’s an accident more often than not. They care for each other and that’s it, viewing the rest of us as less than insects. Toys, that’s all we mortals are for them, to move around and make dance and sing sad songs about. 

She’s their leash, keeping them in check. If it wasn’t for her protection, they would’ve killed me a dozen times over. I’ve seen times she was too late, seen all the things Ivy can do with her vast library of knowledge, even if she tried her best to keep those particular memories from me. There are worlds they would’ve razed that she’s saved with a reprimand, and she’s the only one that can stop them. The only one they fear. I’m certainly not strong enough. 

I’m scared too. Scared of them and scared of her, in the same way I’m scared of myself when I smell smoke on the wind, and my first thought is to fight. The world is a hostile mass of loud noises, of smells that leave me writhing because of how unfamiliar they are. I dream of stuff from novels, ranging from childish fantasies to campfire tall tales, and I know I should be used to it by now — she is — but I’m not. Each time I think I understand the world we live in, something new starts pounding at my skull like a hammer, desperate to get out. I sing and scream, words that aren’t mine but ones I never needed to learn, and I’m overwhelmed, dragged undertow by the vastness of her mind and the relative insignificance of mine.

She’s felt every touch, heard every sound, but everything tastes like ash to her. I remember the first times she faked a smile at what used to be her favorite meal, but there’s a gap between those instances and a hundred years later, when that smile started to feel natural. I bite into an apple, and every time, I’m surprised at the lack of protest. When my memories grow strongest, after a bad trigger, I forget to eat for days on end. If I manage to muster up the motivation to open the fringe, anything short of raw meat leaves me with the distinct impression that it’s rotten, will taste as good as shit rolled in dirt. 

None of this stuff is news. It’s just... facts of living a life that’s not my own. I don’t want to be pitied, and the idea of feeding your patron doesn’t exactly thrill me. It’s nice to put my thoughts down on paper, I suppose, but I can’t really say any of this is really true. Not that I’m lying, I’m not sure I could lie to you if I wanted to, but the framing feels disingenuous. I was supposed to tell you a scary story. What should I say? That time a Conduit of the Passion Fueled Immolation found me drenched, half frozen to death, curled up into a ball on a street corner on one of my first rainy nights, confused because almost all of my memories suggested I should permanently be as cold as a corpse, offered to warm me up? She was beautiful, so warm, and I knew there was something of Jonny in her fire, but I told myself I was just paranoid. I convinced myself all the instincts to run where overactive, inherited from her. Not that she runs or plays dead anymore. 

I nearly died three different times that night. Once from the hypothermia that’d already set in, once from the severe first degree burns across my chest, and once at the Doctor’s hands. I’m not being coy or defending her when I say she legitimately forgot the anesthesia, I was there. I was the one screaming as she knit my nerves back together, patched my skin with needle and thread. 

Do you want to hear about the weeks I spent chased across Scotland, staying in shitty inn after shitty inn? I could barely sleep, I knew the Conduit was on my heel for being something then didn’t fit into their understanding of the world. They hated me.

I don’t know if it was the Conduit or a Liar or just my mind on the fritz again, but every time I got close to a sense of safety, I swore I heard howling. Not wolves or coyotes, though those wouldn’t make sense for the time of year either. Not anything native to Earth. I couldn’t put my finger on where that sound was from until months later, when I realized they sounded exactly like biomechanical beasts that the Doctor had been torn apart by in Snow White’s Rebellion. The Rose Reds serving as the beasts’ handlers spread her pieces wide and made the cuts messy so the regeneration would be slow and painful. 

Funny thing is, you want to know the worst part of that experience? The months after. I couldn’t exactly pay my bills, not when I was so scared for my life, and by the time the Doctor came to save me, I’d gotten evicted from my flat. Couldn’t ask her for help, not because she wouldn’t try, but because she wouldn’t know what I wanted. All my memories suggest she’d take a cry for help as a suggestion to slaughter the Tories. Not that I’m saying that wouldn’t have any positive effects, for me or for other people, but… but nothing, I suppose. I didn’t ask. I probably won’t. I’m not that person. I don’t make the hard choices; I’m the consequence of everyone else’s hard choices.

She must’ve been like me, when she was younger. Before everything and nothing and more than a million years. If she used to be different, then maybe I could change too. Maybe I’d be like her.

I’m not going to get that chance. For better or worse, I’m mortal. My wounds leave permanent marks. All the pain I’ve suffered because of her only serves to separate the two of us. Maybe one day I’ll just be a mess of scar tissue, and then I’ll finally be my own person. I’ll have nightmares of my own, plagued by fears that aren’t recycled stories of hers. 

Well, this is what you get to hear. This is what I am when I’m reduced to all that I’m afraid of. Just a shallow, fractured reflection of her. I’m not even surprised, you know? 

Yours dearest, Maki

Final comments. 

Maki and I communicated over email extensively in early 2011 as I attempted to determine how and if the Mechanisms related to the entities. She was one of my most consistent witnesses, although obviously most of her claims were impossible to follow up on. I found her through Bandcamp, surprisingly enough. I didn’t expect clones of immortal vampire scientists from space to sell their music online, but she gave me an impressively detailed explanation of how thoroughly the Tories have “fucked me and people like me.” I’m not sure if she was referring to other people with disabilities or clones, and I didn’t ask. 

There’s evidence of persons matching her physical description and going by the same name tracking back centuries, which at first I took as a sign that “Maki Yamazaki” was merely another of Doctor Carmilla’s pseudonyms. However, I eventually noticed the distinction between encounters where she showed signs of eye damage, wore an eyepatch, or had some sort of adaptive device and those where she didn’t. The latter correlated with times she went by Maki, while the former with times she went by Doctor Carmilla or, occasionally, anagrams of that name. Mallarca was a favorite for some time in the eighteen hundreds. 

I eventually concluded that the Powers aren’t overtly involved or responsible for Doctor Carmilla or the Mechanisms. There are certainly overlapping themes in between becoming an Avatar— what Maki describes as a Conduit— and their immortality, but there isn’t the same bond of servitude and, at the end of the day, Avatars die like everyone else. Contrary to what several statements suggest, I don’t believe Doctor Carmilla has any form of hypnosis. It seems more likely to me that she is simply incredibly charismatic and physically strong. 

I’m relieved that there doesn’t seem to be a ritual to stop at the end of this particular research project. I wouldn’t know where to start.


End file.
